tackabery chronicle

I've moved

2006-05-06T11:06:00.000-05:00

I have set up a new site at my own domain name which is hosted by Yahoo Small Business. My blog is now available at:

michelletackabery.net

I hope you will head over there and subscribe to my blog feed. I needed more space and more options than Blogger could provide for my site going forward. I hope to have a pic or two from the NCSU press conference announcing the new coach on that site later on tonight. My husband is going over to the post-presser fan hangout to snap some with our new camera. I'll be home hanging out with the kitties, still recuperating from my hysteroscopic myomectomy which took place yesterday afternoon. I'll be home taking it easy for a few days. Ciao.

Archie's big brother approached?

2006-04-30T15:58:00.000-05:00

Tom Suiter has reported that NCSU has approached Sean Miller, one of Archie Miller's numerous siblings, Xavier's current head man and an incredibly smart and passionate coach. I am all for this one, and hope it's true, even if there is a Herb-hating backlash. I'm convinced a few games of Sean popping the trademark Miller bubblegum and hollerin' on the sidelines would cure them of that.

p.s. I have just registered my own domain name, michelletackabery.net, and am in the process of moving my blog over there. I am hosting it on Yahoo Small Business and using WordPress. It's going to take me a while to get everything moved over. Wordpress will enable me to add categories and search to my blog, and hosting my own site will enable me to add image-rich templates and other cool things in the future. I will get a lot more room over there as well. For the time being I'll be double-posting until I get everything moved over, then I'll keep this up for a while until I'm sure my posts are getting indexed under the new url, which might take six to nine months or even longer. I've been getting more serious about my blog in the last couple of months, and mulling over this step for a while.

Technorati tags: nc state wolfpack, sean miller, wordpress

I take back what I said about the NBA

2006-04-23T10:00:00.000-05:00

Lebron James is just simply . . . amazing.

Technorati tags: nba basketball, lebron james

Some Steve guy

2006-04-22T21:36:00.000-05:00

I can't quite get my head around Steve Lavin. He looks like a hockey coach, seems to aspire to dress like Pat Riley, and is the king of bad cliches on that king of bad cliche network, the network that is now making up the sports news, ESPN. Sports guys down here are creaming themselves over his girlfriend, who looks, well, plastic. I'm convinced she's actually a Barbie doll. If this is going to be our guy, apparently most of the yahoos on the boards are going to up their season tickets to get a closer look. Which might be statutory rape. What is she, sixteen? The power of the airbrush never fails to astound me.

Yet . . . if he brings that record here and does it again, and again, and again, and manages to tick off Roy and K enough to make us a contender again, I will worship his hair-gelled scalp. But nah . . . it's so not going to happen. We're going to end up with the Herb look-alike. Let's be honest. We're going to get the guy who has an equipment manager named Bubba, so we will keep Werner and Horner. We're Wolfpack fans. It's our fate to be mostly disappointed. What would life actually be like inside the RBC Center if we weren't all yelling "Rebound!" during every offensive possession while the ball falls onto the lonely court, not one guy in white anywhere near the basket because they are all hanging out on the perimeter?

I can't remember . . . it's been such a . . . long, long time. I liked the Princeton/NC State/one heartbeat/communist party offense, when we were actually running it. I love those heart-stopping threes - nothing better than that moment when your stomach comes straight up to your throat and you are praying to Allah for that ball to fall in the hole! - but when it went cold this year, those iron bricks felt like nails. Bam, bam, bam.

Maybe I'm just in my usual basketball withdrawal mode that always happens at this time of year, right when the NBA playoffs start and the only basketball is being played by a bunch of overpaid pansies trying to muster some manufactured passion with a lot of loud beats and fireworks because they don't play, um, defense. It's only interesting when the Spurs play somebody and Manu is doing his flying Jedi maneuvers and Duncan is being Duncan, or Lebron is on the court; until I can see Jules or AG on tv, I couldn't give a darn what happens in that league. Sigh. Where's our Coach, Lee? Give us a break.

Technorati tags: nc state wolfpack, steve lavin, john beilein, nba basketball

The ad from hell got on the Today show

2006-04-20T18:46:00.000-05:00

The VW ad made the Today show this morning. You can catch the clip on Jalopnik's ad blog. It's fascinating to dope the ad wonk's comments on whether or not the ad is effective or not, but at least Today had somebody saying the ads missed the point. The point about the trauma. I am trying to figure out who gets my complaint letters. I am not going to stop screaming about this, at least here. My medication costs a lot of bloody money. Maybe as much as that damned ad campaign. At least as much as that stupid car that I am never going to buy.

Technorati tags: Ad, ptsd, vw

Debilitation

2006-04-19T19:44:00.000-05:00

Since being shocked by the VW ad last night, I have been in something of a state that has grown progressively more debilitating all day. This morning my husband tried to make love to me, but my orgasm was no release. Like a viper uncurling from its nest, the firing of those muscles unleashed a strike of terror that began a chain reaction in me: anxiety, racing heartbeat, constricted breathing, uncontrollable crying, shaking, rocking.

Hell of a way to start the day. Thank you, VW.

I managed to get some marginal control over myself after a while, but then I had an appointment with Dr. Steege to discuss my upcoming surgery and I was anxious about a possible pelvic exam. I didn't get one, but all day after, my nervous system has been firing and firing and firing. My head is pounding from nervous exhaustion and adrenaline that isn't being used for anything. My eyes hurt. My neck is sore. My stomach is full of acid. And I can't get that fucking commercial out of my head.

Living at this level of anxiety, with all my nerves on high alert, is impossible to sustain for very long. I need to call my shrink, but I'm afraid I'll end up back on nefazodone (Serzone) or some other SSRI. Nefazodone damps down the neurons. It's as effective as a nuclear bomb at stopping that response cold. The last time I was on it, though, I gained 40 pounds, a fatty liver and high blood pressure. That being said, the alternative -- the inability to shut down my nervous system to a manageable level -- might be worse. When I get tuned up like this, I can jump at every shadow. On the way home from work tonight, a Corolla pulled out in front of us as we were changing lanes. I think my heart stopped as I grabbed the God-almighty bar and tensed up like all hell was about to break loose. Now my back is aching.

All of these physical reactions are torturous. They make me want to rock myself into a coma after I drink half a bottle of Stoli. Or shoot myself in the head.

Technorati tags: Ad, ptsd, vw

If I ever was a VW fan, that bird has flown now

2006-04-18T21:19:00.000-05:00

Thanks to their recent “Safe Happens” ad campaign. As someone who suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder that has been effectively re-triggered by car accidents, those two ads are so graphically realistic and horrible that they caused me physical pain to watch. I disassociated for a moment, and then everything came slamming back, just like when the eye of the storm in the middle of a hurricane passes over, and the wind rushes into the vacuum of silence that is the storm center. All is chaos in my body and my heart. I feel like I can barely breathe from the fear and I can see that crash from the “Movie” spot whenever I close my eyes. I can hear the fiberglass meeting fiberglass and the glass breaking, and the terrible stopping of breath. It scared me so much, I didn’t ever realize until I started researching the spot on the net that the people riding in the cars were alive at the end.

I work for a personal injury lawyer, and a few moments later, I started thinking about what I could do about it. I understand what VW is trying to do with this shock approach, but it’s a fine line. It’s such a fine, thin, razor-sharp line, I need medication to blur it down. Otherwise, it cuts.

I cannot believe the blatant disregard for public safety VW and their ad agency (whom I believe is Crispin, Porter + Bogusky, the same people responsible for the brilliantly artistic, but most likely ineffective, anti-smoking Truth campaign) is showing by not warning people about the consequences of car accidents and that what they are portraying is a basic promise that one cannot get hurt in a car crash that takes place inside one of their vehicles. I can probably find a few thousand car accident reports that prove otherwise, just in the Raleigh-Durham-Fayetteville metropolitan area.

Fair warning, i.e., the disclaimer that VW won’t give you. The links below direct you to a media site in which the linked ads begin playing as soon as they finish loading in your browser. They contain graphically violent depictions of car accidents and the possibility of serious personal injury.

VW-Movie (2 couples discussing a movie)

VW-Like (2 guys backing out of a driveway)

Technorati tags: Ad, ptsd, vw

Delirium, then the darkness

2006-04-13T22:42:00.000-05:00

Today I had a physical therapy session, and during a breathing exercise I had a lot of trouble relaxing into my breath. Breathing - you know, that involuntary thing we do many times a minute - is not something that is easy for me to relax into. I have been trying meditation to get a handle on it, but I have knots on the knots in the muscles in my diaphragm. I know that this stems from my childhood night terrors: the terror of my father coming in to my room, and the terror of my parents fighting. In my child's mind, to avoid the former situation, I imagined that if I could pretend to be asleep, regulating my breathing and not making a single sound, my father wouldn't hear me and forget I was there. My room was the first door on the right just inside our apartment in the projects, and what I wanted more than anything was for him to keep on walking. I would screw my eyes shut, and try not to breathe. But he would creak into my bed anyway, his enormously large frame weighing down my mattress so that it scraped the floorboards.

To avoid the latter situation, I imagined that I had to stay awake, to bear witness. To perhaps prevent my father from hurting my mother, because the fighting between them scared me. My father's voice was deep and he was a large man with large, bearish hands (he called them his paws) and, at 6 feet 4 inches, an imposing physical presence and strength leftover from Marine Corps training. I don't know what I thought I would do, but I think I learned that if they knew I was listening, they would stop.

Enter insomnia, and paralysis of the diaphragm. This morning when I was having trouble, I managed to share something of the reason why I was having problems with my therapist, but as I was telling her about it, all I could think about was being locked in the closet. In the dark and the heat, with my terror, soaked in my own fear and urine. Later tonight, Richard and I went to see Delirium, Cirque du Soleil's latest musical show, which was weird and wonderful and moving, and the show relaxed me to the point where I was thinking of nothing but music, and motion, and the magic of people working together - the strength routines Cirque does are my favorite parts of their shows - when during one of the last numbers, I was suddenly back in that closet, four or five or six years old again, and the music and the community of artists on stage was far away, and I was separate from humanity again. I could feel an overwhelming urge to rock, and hyperventilate. The flashback was coming. I tried not to hold it back, but it came. I managed to tell my husband we had to go. The last number, an encore of the title song from Alegria - one of my favorites - began, but I was in the bathroom. Trying to catch my breath.

Technorati tag: ptsd flashbacks, cirque du soleil

Calipari Come Here!

2006-04-09T17:44:00.000-05:00

The net is aflutter here in Raleigh with the news that Fowler, Oblinger and the boys (plus the Mrs.) just popped off a private plane at RDU after chatting with John Calipari in Memphis. Anybody with his own .com is fine with me. My husband tells me that Coach Calipari set up a fund to help his former players graduate from school with his own money and has a sky-high graduation rate. Plus he's a snappy dresser and has a degree in marketing, which just touches my heart. Wouldn't he look good in a red Wolfpack power tie? I can dig it. Crossing my fingers . . .

Technorati tag: John Calipari, nc state wolfpack

Posttraumatic growth

2006-04-08T20:33:00.000-05:00

Found some interesting stuff on the web today about ptsd, namely the changes in psychiatry in the treatment of it. The work of philosophers like Victor Frankl and psychotherapists like Irvin Yalom, plus the overwhelming evidence that not all abused children become psychopaths or otherwise victimized past the point of being able to function in society, has led to what can be termed the "positive" focus of ptsd treatment. In this approach, instead of merely focusing on the negative aspects of ptsd, the therapist attempts to facilitate posttraumatic growth.

The article I read by Drs. Richard G. Tedeschi and Lawrence Calhoun in Psychiatric Times XXI:4 (April 2004) had one section in particular that really struck home for me today:

A central theme of the life challenges that are the focus here is their seismic nature (Calhoun and Tedeschi, 1998). Much like earthquakes can impact the physical environment, traumatic circumstances, characterized by their unusual, uncontrollable, potentially irreversible and threatening qualities, can produce an upheaval in trauma survivors' major assumptions about the world, their place in it and how they make sense of their daily lives. In reconsidering these assumptions, there are the seeds for new perspectives on all these matters and a sense that valuable--although painful--lessons have been learned.
As the individual comes to recognize some goals as no longer attainable and that some components of the assumptive world can not assimilate the reality of the aftermath of the trauma, it is possible for the individual to begin to formulate new goals and to revise major components of the assumptive world in ways that acknowledge their changed life circumstances.

I can only remain hopeful that the seismic shifts I'm undergoing now will lead me to substantial growth in the immediate future. The word "seismic" does scare me a teeny bit, however.

Technorati tag: ptsd

Shrink Day

2006-04-07T19:13:00.000-05:00

I see my psychiatrist every three weeks, and today we talked about my emotional meltdowns and the continual anxiety attacks, abdominal and pelvic pain, headaches, insomnia, suicidal thoughts, crying spells and other symptoms I've been experiencing since I started my vaginal physical therapy. He suggested gently that I may want to discuss with my gynecologist the possibility of stopping my PT altogether. The main topic of discussion was the utility of knowing the whole truth about what really happened to me.

There's an aspect to culture that admires the hero who perserveres despite physical pain and anguish. The athlete who plays through pain. The soldier who takes a hail of bullets and keeps running. The platoon leader who stands up in live combat and rushes in to save the entire outfit without any sign of fear. But perhaps fear is the right response. Imagine you are walking in a forest in the semi-dark, and you are approaching low thorny branches in your path. Instinctively, you duck your head. As you proceed through the thicket, your head crouches lower and your stance changes to avoid any more branches. This is your animal instinct, protecting you. This is the ingrained, brilliantly-designed mechanism of your body, saving you without your having to stop and think about it. You don't need to activate any software - you're hard-wired to protect yourself. Small animals play dead, but your heart speeds up and your adrenaline kicks in and you start running when you are attacked. Your body, of which your brain is a part, is protecting you. Fear in this instance is a rational response. It might be the irrational thing - perhaps also the human thing, but not necessarily the right thing - to stay and fight.

In some circumstances, facing fear in some attempt to conquer and remove it might not be the right thing to do.

Consider another example. Sickening and evil memories can be described as tumors or cancers, as festering abcesses that must be ferreted out, opened; their pus expelled, rinsed with sterile saline, packed with dressing, treated with antibiotics and sewn up to heal. If you are operated on, say, and your gall bladder is removed, your body adjusts to that removal. You're not the same anymore. Your body is not what it was. It's going to adjust. It's going to build scar tissue, and when you touch it there, it's going to feel different. It's going to be a little bit tender, so that you always protect that vulnerable area that is now missing what it once contained. This is a natural process.

When I was in session I recalled for my doctor a recent cold medicine commercial. The actor in the commercial gets out of bed, takes the cold medicine, and goes to work. He goes on with his day as if nothing happened. Yet his body is sick. Maybe he should be resting. Maybe he shouldn't be infecting anyone else. Maybe he should be letting his body heal, and then maybe he should leave the wound alone for a while.

My physical therapy, while the sessions themselves are not at all stressful, is causing me free-floating anxiety that then attaches to pieces of my life that I cannot afford to stain with anxiety, like my job and my marriage and my health. Where my sexual trauma is concerned, there are memories buried that might be dug up and rinsed away, much like cleaning an abcess. But what would be the utility? What good would it really do? To know the truth, such as it is? My father, who perpetrated the crimes, is dead, and my mother and most of my family is estranged from me. There is no court or body that can give me a fresh brain and new memories and take away what I have, which is post-traumatic stress disorder. Perhaps it should just all be left alone. Sanity is a bit more precious than knowledge to me right now.

Technorati tag: ptsd

"Signs, Symptoms and Injuries . . .

2006-04-06T19:13:00.000-05:00

. . . consistent with being raped and sexually assaulted." That's the evidence from the search warrant application (posted on the Smoking Gun site) that was unsealed yesterday in what is known in these parts as the Duke lacrosse rape case. There are so many issues surrounding this case - white privilege, student athlete privilege, hazing, rape, male on female violence, hate crimes, rich vs. poor, Duke vs. NC Central; oh, and then there's lacrosse, a game given to us by the natives we burned out of this country and now the property of rich white landowners. If it weren't about the saddest thing in the world, the irony might make you laugh.

I couldn't sleep so well last night - my nightly cocktail of sleep-without-dreams-drugs didn't kick in per usual, so I watched the movie Boys Don't Cry, which I had never seen. The rape scene at the end is particularly horrific. The movie is extraordinarily well done and superbly acted - I realized Hilary deserved that little naked gold man - so much so that I was thinking of the main character as a him, even as I'm staring at her obvious lack of manhood when it gets brutally revealed. In these situations, outsiders tend to lay more blame on the so-called victims of the deception, for wanting to be loved so much that they willingly walk into being deceived, but they forget how much work went into the hiding of the truth, the lying, the deceiving in the first place. I know, because I've hid so much in my life, even from myself, that I can walk around amnesiac, with no real memory of the truth of some situations in my past because I have so effectively blocked them from my memory.

The brain in these situations can seem like blessed relief. It gives us the gift of passing out when the stress is too much, of blanking out, of being unable to function when the stress becomes unbearable and unmanageable. Yet even the brain can deceive us, because the truth is never hidden. It sticks around. It gets remembered in the body. The body bears the "signs, symptoms and injuries" consistent with the traumatic event. At the end of Boys Don't Cry, when Brandon is shot dead, I found myself relieved, because I knew her body was not going to forget that trauma, even if her mind succeeded in convincing her that it had never happened, even if her mind succeeded in convincing her that she could have a happily ever after, even if her mind succeeded so well that she forgot it ever happened. Because one day, there might be another penetration in the minefield, and the mines would go off.

Setting free the signs, symptoms and injuries. Proof of ptsd. There might be false memories, but there are no false mines.
Technorati tags: ptsd, hilary swank, movie:boys don't cry, duke lacrosse

Minefield

2006-04-05T17:21:00.000-05:00

Sexual trauma leaves live mines buried in the surface of the psyche. Last night and today, some of my live mines went off and innocent people in the blast radius got peppered with shrapnel.

Being forced to perform sexually, awakening responses your mind can’t deal with; those memories don’t just get entrenched into neurons and dendrites. They get written into muscle groups and nerve endings, and they can be prodded awake. I’m undergoing intra-vaginal physical therapy. What this means for the uninitiated (hey, I was uninitiated until a few weeks ago), is that the muscles in my vaginal area are stretched and pressed and manipulated to relieve muscle tension and stress in the same way that other muscle groups might be stretched and pressed and manipulated. But those particular muscles are my minefield, and the mines they hold reveal trauma that arises, free-floating, into anxiety that has no place to rest.

Enter the unsuspecting spreadsheet or administrative assistant or husband or boss, and boom! Emotional meltdown. Lucky for me, I have an understanding boss and a mental health day available.

Now if I could only find some mental health . . .
Technorati tags: ptsd

Friday he was here, now he's gone

2006-04-03T17:33:00.000-05:00

I'm too connected to my basketball team, because I've been thinking about them all day. I feel like a sister just got divorced, or something. I'm not personally affected, but there's something missing, like a tooth that's just been pulled. You keep tonguing the hole, feeling strange. I felt like this after my gall bladder surgery, especially the day I got a CT scan and watched on the monitor as my gastrointestinal tract was slowly revealed to be missing a little piece. There was just a black empty space, and things are never the same again. I had five or six people at work ask me how I was doing today, now that we are without a basketball coach. Yesterday I was just feeling ashamed of us. Now we just have the aftermath.

I was reminded of just what we lost - thanks, Arizona State, for that. Coach Sendek accomplished a lot. I would hope none of this sours what any of his players achieved this year, but I know what my heart says. For them, it's now bittersweet forever. Something missing, something a bit off, something a wee bit sour. Something not quite like regret. More like a scar.

Technorati tags: nc state wolfpack, herb sendek, arizona state

Weird day to be a Wolfpacker

2006-04-02T08:04:00.000-05:00

According to Ned, we all got what we wanted. I feel uneasy though. One of my two favorite players (Evtimov) is leaving to take his chances professionally this year, leaving Atsur on his own. Sendek is going. If he takes Phelps and the rest of the guys with him, that's everyone Engin came here for. Those are crucial relationships and this is his last year. I had a hard senior year where I felt I was essentially alone because I was separated from my friends. It still hurts. I know he's a resilient person, but we ask enough of them as it is.

Change is going to be hard, a lot harder than I think any of us know. All those Herb haters who are rejoicing because they feel like they put enough pressure on Sendek to want to go, are going to have to deal with a basketball team who had that pressure put on them as well. It wasn't just Herb who got our particularly nasty brand of the fan shaft. It was them. One of the lessons they just learned is, winning isn't everything. Neither is conducting yourself with heart, determination and grace. Sometimes it doesn't amount to jack.

I hope they learned the other lesson, the one Sendek just got this year. Some people do notice when you do it right.

Technorati tags: nc state wolfpack, herb sendek, ilian evtimov, engin atsur, arizona state

Playing Dead

2006-03-23T19:58:00.000-05:00

Small, helpless animals play dead if they are sense attack by a larger predator and see no way to escape. One of the many tricks nature gifts the animal brain in self-defense, children learn this neat trick too, if they find themselves under attack before they can process what is happening to them. I figured out the other day that I learned to play dead so well, I nearly become paralyzed with an inability to break free of my play-acting.

I am currently undergoing physical therapy for pelvic pain, among all the many things physically wrong with me right now. The pelvic pain appears to be caused by a chain reaction of events: scar tissue from my last two surgeries, stress making my deep vaginal muscles tense, and oh yeah, there's that PTSD thing from being a victim of early sexual trauma. I never realized that there was such a thing as intra-vaginal physical therapy, but there is. I have a very gifted therapist, but my first session with her, as wonderful, caring and patient as she was, freaked me out for days. After my first session I was in a great deal of abdominal pain (GI symptoms kicking in), my head was killing me, and I found myself getting teary-eyed for no particularly good reason. During the session, when she was poking around inside me, I felt fine.

Two days later I had to have a sonohystogram. Dr. Steege at UNC-OB/Gyn wanted to see if my fibroid or fibroids were partly inside my uterine cavity. If so, he would consider recommending a kind of procedure in which he can cauterize the fibroid, a much more welcome option to me than a partial hysterectomy, which is what my regular gynecologist was offering. I felt fine during the exam. Not stressed. I am a big girl. I can take anything. Nothing can hurt me.

The fact is, though, that I was not fine. I was in some hard and even severe pain during both examinations, but I did not tell the examiners that. I was unable. Physically unable, because I was playing dead. Lying there. Taking it. Because that was the only option when I was three, or four, or five, which is about how old I think I was when my trauma started. I couldn't say it hurt. I couldn't even move. I could only nod, even smile!, and be compliant.

I've heard some women say that if they were ever raped, they'd fight like hell. They would kick and claw and scream. I realized, after a few days of percolating thought on what was going on with me during those exams, and after talking to my shrink about it, that I would not fight. I would lie there and play dead. I'm going to be scheduling a hysteroscopic myomectomy in the near future, and I will thankfully be under anesthesia. So I won't have to worry about having to play dead in case I get hurt.

ptsd

More Sendek Saga

2006-03-21T20:47:00.000-05:00

First of all, Chip Alexander's article in the N&O today was unconscionable, full of rumors and half-truths. I think it is completely unfair to talk about Cedric Simmons' father's employment. I think it is ridiculous to make speculations about why Coach Sendek walked across the court with an upset look on his face after the loss Sunday (duh, we lost, and badly. We were all pissed. I wasn't even watching. I was so upset, I was cleaning my house with a vengeance I usually only reserve for breaking down boxes previously full of marketing tchotchkes. But I digress). Our season is not defined by failure, Brackman's pitching arm, Herb choking on his tie, or any of the other straws currently being grasped at to be tossed on the fire of our discontent.

Secondly, thank goodness for David Glenn, who reminded us today that certain beloved coaches of the past failed to attain NCAA titles in their first 10 seasons, among them: Dean Smith, Everett Case, Norm Sloan, Dave Odom, Terry Holland, and Mike Krzyzewski.

And thirdly, to my point (and I do have one, thank you Dennis Miller): what we have here is a failure to communicate. I am blaming this one squarely on Lee Fowler and his Media Relations staff, because they don't get new media. They may be earning some nifty awards for their media guides (totally useless BTW; they could make so much more revenue if they were smarter about it, but again, I digress), but they have missed the boat. Hell, they've missed the whole damned armada. The Wolfpack Nation is full of people so committed to their teams, so in love with their university, so bloody passionate, that they are posting, blogging, and clogging up phone lines bitching their heads off and coming to blows with each other. Fowler blew it last football season with the Amato fiasco, and he's ignored them now to the point that they've turned the Sendek Saga into a Scylla monster. No doubt we are about to be dosed in the warm bath of another Lee Fowler press release . . . which is so last century. They need to get with the program.

I believe, as I posted yesterday, that there is still a vast, silent pro-Herb minority. They may not be so silent, how would I know? I think they want Herb and the basketball team to succeed. I think they want the football team to succeed under Amato. Yet I continue to be disheartened by Fowler's inability to engage in dialogue with the fans. He leaves them to dialogue with each other, and fights break out between the Coach and the fans. Fire Herb websites go up.

Frustrated people will only get more frustrated. Louder. Drunker. Stupider. They've already lost all perspective; it's already gotten ugly, it's already too late. But, maybe not to0 late to get rid of Fowler, or for Fowler to get rid of his Assistant AD. There are professionals who know how to massage the media. There are marketers who know how to produce and syndicate content. There are professionals who know that facing your audience, looking them in the eye, and engaging them in honest dialogue is the way new media works. It's the way organizations succeed now. It's the way the NCSU Athletic Department is failing now. In PR terms, they've lost control of the conversation, but it's really not about control in the new media world today. It's about changing people's perspective. It's about making people see your point of view. That's the job of a good marketing/PR/advertising team. And we just ain't got one.

nc state wolfpack

A marketer's perspective on the Sendek Saga

2006-03-20T19:11:00.000-05:00

First, let me say I'm not happy about losing, especially the way we lost. Man, that hurt. But I know the hurt I have is nothing compared to the hurt of fourteen guys who are going to be living with this game for the rest of their lives. Especially Ilian, my hero. I hate like hell that was his last game for us. I really, really do. But, onward and upward. The posters are on a rampage and the media is following merrily along: will he or won't he? What will the university do? Should Herb Sendek be fired? Is this the stupidest discussion you have ever heard, or what? Other universities would be licking our ice-cold court (there is a hockey rink underneath there, you know) to have the season we had, but not the Wolfpack Nation. It seems most of us want to fire our head coach. Or do we?

An article posted in the Economist and written about by Jakob Nielsen in his UseIt newsletter, which I received today, gave me some food for thought. The words from Nielsen refer to posters on internet message boards who complain about company websites, and the time and energy companies spend trying to track down and fix the problems these posters pose with their ire. To wit, the Economist discovered, according to Nielsen, that:

90% of company website users are lurkers, not posters, so the companies concerned about "public opinion" vis-a-vis the internet are only hearing from a vocal minority.
Given a +/- 5% standard of error, that means that vocal minority is made up of about 5% of users.
Of that posting 5%, posts occur on a Zipf frequency distribution. Data that follows a Zipf frequency distribution will have a very few data points that score very, very high (i.e., posters who post with great frequency) and a great many data points that score very, very low (i.e., posters who post with very low frequency). Which means that the actual complainers may represent about 5% of 5%, or 0.025% of users. Nielsen calls this tiny sliver of users a "super-vocal micro-minority."

From a customer service investment perspective, trying to satisfy this micro-minority is a huge waste of marketing dollars, when you actually have 90% success, albeit silent. So what does this have to do with the Wolfpack Nation?

I believe strongly that the discontent being expressed on message boards and talk radio, and that has now splashed its way onto front pages and other coaches' (Barnes, K) press conferences thanks to the helping hand of the Raleigh News & Observer, represents the micro-minority, and that there is a vast silent majority that supports Sendek. Fowler, Oblinger and the entire university would be completely stupid (or, as Ilian so aptly put it, idiotic) to make a coaching change based on the micro-minority.

My $0.02, do with it what you will.

nc state wolfpack
Herb Sendek

We won and I'm damned happy!

2006-03-18T11:14:00.000-05:00

To quote Forrest Gump, that's all I have to say about that.

What's getting missed: 14 guys

2006-03-14T21:42:00.000-05:00

The Sendek talk has officially jumped the shark, in my opinion, with Caulton Tudor's article today. The Wolfpack Nation has lost all perspective. We have no idea what we are looking at any more when we can ignore the 14 guys who have to get on a plane, probably tomorrow, and prepare to play a game in Dallas that's not just the first game of the dance; it's now the first game in what might be the last gasp of their head coach's job. That's far too much for any of us to ask.

It's too much to ask 14 18-23-year-olds save a program, a university and an entire fan base from itself. They lost their last four games; it's over. I'm so sick of hearing about it. They have to be sick of hearing about it. They are beat to bloody pulp, and they probably have no chance of winning. Who expects it of them? They got into the tournament on the strength of all the games before their skid, but they got in at their current seed because of that skid, and it was much more than a fall from grace. It was closer to a free-fall parachute jump from 40,000 feet into enemy territory, and the enemy is us.

I'm depressed for them, and sad, but I'm sadder about us than about them. I'm sad that we have wrought this upon these young men. I really wish my January-early February team was here. I really wish the team I saw play at Clemson was here. I hope that team gets on the plane to Dallas. But most of all I hope they don't take the baggage of a hundred thousand Wolfpack fans who just can't stand to be good and even a little bit great, and want to be perfect. I hope they can see themselves as their opponents see them: a dangerous basketball team. I hope they can see themselves as their coaches see them: a capable basketball team. I hope they can see themselves as I see them: my basketball team. I'm going to miss them when they go, but I wouldn't blame them if they didn't want to come back. I wouldn't want to play anymore for this bunch of losers, either.

nc state wolfpack

Bad Wolfpack mojo

2006-03-12T07:30:00.000-05:00

Even though I was reminded how good-looking Vinny del Negro is this morning (sorry honey), the news was disturbing. Scary rumblings made me realize that my shiny-happy post from yesterday might really be blowing smoke up my own you-know-where. The aforementioned (well, previously linked I guess) N&O story quoted an unnamed NBA scout who said it seemed at least two guys were playing "outside the structure of offense." Perhaps its the same guys who weren't catching Atsur's passes on Friday or ignoring him when he went around for the back-door cut and was wide-open for the three about twenty friggin' times. Bennerman's quote in the Foul Shots column ("some guys on this team haven't even figured it (the NC State offense) out yet'') was pretty telling. But for me the ugliest part was two words in Ed Hardin's column in the Greensboro News & FishWrap (as my friend Marvin so poignantly calls it): "players' families." As in, and I quote:

All of Friday stories circulated about secret meetings and outside suitors inquiring about Sendek. Influential boosters and the players' families didn't bother trying to hide their disdain behind his back as State was then throttled by the lowest seed in the tournament. The game was an ugly display of fans wanting something too much.

When it ended, not a sound was heard from the Wolfpack legions. They simply walked away.

I don't feel too good. I'm taking some Tagamet and going to a baseball game.

nc state wolfpack
Cameron Bennerman

Okay, I'm back, faithful again.

2006-03-11T20:17:00.000-05:00

Pack Pride posted some great pictures of our, um, game (for lack of a better word) yesterday. I'm feeling a little better since BC kicked the shit out of Carolina. In times of adversity, getting a little bit of your own off of your enemy is allowed. I'm sure that team is full of very nice guys. I'm just very happy those nice guys went home tonight. I couldn't bear a Duke-Carolina final. I just couldn't. I would have had to leave the house while my husband watched it and gone to a state park or something, far, far away from wired civilization. I am so sick of listening to accolades about ballers dressed in blue I want to vomit. But I am digressing. Sorry.

Looking at these pictures, first I was struck by the flagrant friggin' fouls. Hands in the face, arms on arms, all kinds of shit. Dirty, dirty dogs. But as my husband said, they weren't called and the game is over. We lost. We're all aware of it. The post-mortem in the paper was particularly painful, especially the huge picture of Sendek collapsing to the court on the front page of the special ACC section. Just like tiny bamboo shoots up the fingernails. I'm sure the Herb Haters creamed over that one. Whoops, that wasn't very ladylike, was it? Balls, who cares, I'm depressed.

Yet, looking carefully at these pictures, I don't see any desperation, I don't see any lack of concern, I don't see mediocrity, and I don't see inability. I see the exact same damned hustle I have seen all year. Bennerman and Grant put up 23 and 24 points respectively, for Pete's sake. There's so much analysis going on, it's driving me crazy. I don't want to analyze. I'm feeling like a Mom right now. I want to give them milk and cookies and a warm blankie and hugs. I'm telling you, this team does not deserve their treatment from our fans and I'm going to refuse to dwell on it or join that particular party. I'm depressed. I'm upset that Sendek doesn't seem to be able to coach his way out of the last 45 seconds of a tight game. But dammit, I am not going to put this team under the bus. I am refusing to listen to bullshit about our lack of stars, lack of personality and lack of heart. It's all smoke from the wrong fire. None of us have any perspective whatsoever. I'm sadder that I may not get to see Ilian Evtimov. Cameron Bennerman and Tony Bethel have a few more heart-stopping, balls-to-the-wall basketball games. There might only be one more. That's the only thing I am going to feel bad about. If that puts me in with the shiny happy people, pass the Prozac.

nc state wolfpack
Cameron Bennerman
Tony Bethel
Ilian Evtimov

In other news, we won the baseball game.

2006-03-10T18:27:00.000-05:00

At about 4:30 p.m. this afternoon, the Wolfpack Nation received absolute confirmation that our basketball team had been kidnapped by aliens and replaced by exact replicas . . . exact in everything except their ability to put the round ball in the round iron hole. They looked like our team, they hustled like our team, they didn't give up . . . just like our team . . . and it was not enough. Ced is apparently sick and now walking around with ice on his hand, Cam limped back into the locker room, Ilian had a pained look on his face before the game even started, and Coach Sendek looked like he hadn't slept in about a week. I wish I could say a nice long week would help this team pull it together. Trouble is, I don't think this is our team. There is just no way these are the same guys I saw a few weeks ago and sighed in amorous affiliation over.

It's over 70 degrees and the grass is green. Time to be saved by baseball season.

nc state wolfpack
college baseball

Wake won their game, now we have to deliver payback

2006-03-09T18:48:00.000-05:00

The Wolfpack knows all about payback. Ilian, Cam and Tony know all about it from last year. They did it before, they can do it again. They have to know that nothing is going to matter unless they beat them tomorrow. I'll be watching. I believe. Go Pack. Everything stops at 2:30 EST tomorrow. Then we'll see.

nc state wolfpack

Parental conflict leads to child insomniacs; in other news, water is wet

2006-03-08T18:56:00.000-05:00

A study published in the journal Child Development has proved a link between parental conflict and behavioral and learning problems in children. The link is poor sleep, which is more pronounced in homes with higher levels of parental conflict. Researchers monitored children's sleep with a special device. In homes where children perceived that the conflict between their parents was ongoing, frequent and unresolved, children slept less, woke up more often during the night, fidgeted, and tossed and turned in bed.

Of course they did. When I was a kid, I would stay awake at night, watching and waiting. For some reason I thought staying awake was important. I had to witness what was going on between my parents. I couldn't stop them from fighting, but my fight-or-flight response was so kicked up that I couldn't sleep. I was anxiously awaiting the fights, and then anxious during the fights, and anxious afterwards waiting to see if the fights would re-occur. The trauma in the house was like a low, never-ending hum of anxiety, like someone who is sitting next to you shaking their leg under a table (thanks boss, this means you). The table just subtly shakes, and you can't be comfortable. You can't stop their behavior, and you can't do anything about it, so the anxiety level just . . . hums along. Shaking. Waiting. Watching. Until you wait and watch at night. All day long you yawn and find yourself distracted by clouds and stray thoughts, but at night, you are awake. Distinctly aware of every sound. Anxious. But now you are just waiting for sleep. The blessed relief you never learned to love, because when you were small, you practiced pushing it away so hard that it can never be a welcome guest.

ptsd
insomnia
sleep disorders

There will be no giving up! That is not the Wolfpack Way!

2006-03-06T18:33:00.000-05:00

I refuse to give up on my team. I'm just not going to do it. I know they are hurting in more ways than physical wounds show. But Engin scored 22 points on Saturday, and Gavin played like a man possessed even with a broken nose, and their hearts are still beating, and I still believe in them. I know that they still have something inside them that no one is seeing but the faithful. I am not going to wallow in this depressive funk that we have all been in, even though we also lost all of our damned baseball games this weekend, including the one on Sunday in which Andrew Brackman allowed five hits in what was the longest third inning I have ever sat through. I am going to fight it until they can pick themselves up and stuff it right back in Wake's face. Or Florida State's face. Or any other All-ACC Team golden boy in a blue jersey they may happen to come across next weekend. God willing. They are more than they have been.

nc state wolfpack
Engin Atsur
Andrew Brackman
Gavin Grant

Can't be happy about losing on Senior Night

2006-02-26T18:06:00.000-05:00

I wish I could feel better about it, but my team is worrying me. They have had the absolutely shittiest week ever. I feel absolutely terrible for the seniors, but they know that the responsibility lies with them. I didn't even get my quintessential Evtimov game - three or four heart-stopping three-point shots and lots of standing up and screaming. We looked like we didn't know or care what we were doing. Boston College had our number all night long. I don't think we scored the last eight minutes of regulation. The overtime sessions were better - we scored 5, but they scored 7. And then it was over.

The past few home games, I have been counting Engin's shots in warmups. He's been shooting lights out then, easy-peasy, but during the game he's not taking shots until the very last moments of possessions in the very last moments of games. He's being too unselfish. I can't believe I am saying this about my favorite player, but I digress. I'm worrying that our coach isn't a game coach. I'm feeling like we have no chance to go deep in the NCAA tournament. But I still believe in them. I know they have it in them to play better. They just have to dig deep and find themselves again. Maybe a week off will help. They have no choice now but to try to win the whole darned ACC Tournament and shut everybody up. Man, I wish that would happen. I really, really do. I won't consider Tony, Cam and Ilian failures if that doesn't happen. But it sure would be nice to see.

[nc state wolfpack]

Usability Hell: A TechComm Primer for Yahoo! Search Marketing

2006-02-24T15:24:00.000-05:00

Yesterday I signed up for a Yahoo! Search Marketing account. I neglected to write down the user name and password I chose. It was never e-mailed to me. I received a welcome message that listed the keyterms I had chosen for my first campaign, and an HTML-coded marketing message directing me to learn how to use the system. In the email was a login url.

At the login url I entered what I thought was my user name and password. It is apparently incorrect. This is when I entered the seventh circle of user hell. I received a re-loaded page with one new feature: a bolded red line of text that read:

Login failed. Try again (Note, it didn't say please).

After three attempts, I clicked on the Forgot Password? prompt at the bottom of the login box. I got to a new html page with a two-line form that read:

Forget Your Password?

Please enter your user name and e-mail address below. If a match is found, we will supply your Password Hint.

I entered what I thought was my username and my email address. The feedback I received was this:

Username must be between 3 and 20 characters.

There is no option to insert my account ID. There is no help link.
I returned to the home page and clicked on help, and there is no link to anything that lists "password." Help does not contain a search box, but only links to directory items. I clicked on "account management." I got to an FAQ that seemed like it would help. It read:

What if I have forgotten my password and/or Yahoo! ID?

You can get a new password, a Yahoo! ID reminder, or both. Go to the Sign-in Problems page and supply some basic verification information, such as your birthday and the ZIP code you provided when you registered.

Make sure to provide the same information you gave during registration or when you last updated your account. Without the correct verification information, you will not be able to obtain a new password.

I clicked on the hyperlink for the sign-in problems page. The page only reloads. I tried this three times in frustration. I can't login to my damned Yahoo! account. I don't know if my ads are running. Someone is going to get very nasty letters from a very pissed-off law firm marketer. Tsk, tsk, tsk.

usability
technical communication
Yahoo

I would never make fun of my PTSD,

2006-02-23T19:30:00.000-05:00

but what I had to go through last night was traumatic.

nc state wolfpack
ptsd

Elevators

2006-02-20T19:31:00.000-05:00

I had an gynecological appointment today - don't flinch, I'm not going to get gross. In my doctor's new building there are brand new elevators. The walls of the elevator are dark mahogany and the lighting is recessed. The elevator is carpeted and quiet. A perfect setting for terror.

When I was a child and we lived in the projects on Staten Island, the elevators frequently broke down. They were dark and damp and scared me to death. We lived on the fourth floor. There were wide stairs, right next to the elevator bank, and I insisted we walk up them in the dank humid heat instead of in the cool, dark, dank elevator that lurched and groaned. Because the elevator was a coffin, a sealed coffin riding in a sealed box with no way out if it got stuck between floors. I would dream, and my dreams were full of suffocation and death in that dark, dank place. My mother would allow me to cajole her up the stairs and she would drag my sister Dianna up the stairs one at a time while she slowly progressed up the stairs with Christine in the stroller. I would race up the wide, well-lit, airy stairs to the fourth floor and wait for them to come up. Until one day my mother complained, and my father decided to cure me of my fear. He threw me in the elevator. And of course, you must know what happened. The elevator got stuck between floors.

I found out later I was only in the box for about 45 minutes. There was a fire department nearby and my father worked for the Post Office and knew a guy who knew a guy and they were there very fast, considering it was just the projects and nobody really gave a shit about who got stuck in an elevator in there. Let them rot. I am 39 years old, and I still dream of being stuck in that long metal box, between floors in the dark, with no air and no way out. So I walk a lot of stairs. And no one is ever going to put me in a coffin, dead or alive.

ptsd

Irrational Fear Response

2006-01-31T08:40:00.000-05:00

This morning when I was getting ready to step into the shower I saw that a bottle of my conditioner had fallen into the tub. I saw what looked like a piece of fluff or dirt or maybe hair on it, and I reached down to pick up the bottle when the thing moved, turning into a gigantic cockroach the size of Cleveland. Okay, not Cleveland, the city, but Cleveland, the representation of the city as it appears on a map inside an atlas.

Objects in the shower at six in the morning may be larger than life. Jesus. I jumped away from it immediately and my heart started pounding, and I ran naked and screaming in to my husband, knight in shining pajamas, who went in to dispose of the nasty beast.

Let me insert here, too, that my house is clean. Every few months we see one of these anomalies, usually crawling up from a drainpipe. It's one of the joys of apartment living that no matter how clean you keep your own house, you are subject to how clean your neighbors keep theirs. This guy was huge, and fast, and ugly. After it was all over and I was safe in a bug-free zone taking my shower, I was still pumping full of adrenaline. Memories of life in the projects when I was a kid. Roach-infested, freezing cold or burning hot, dank, tired, cramped buildings with poor lighting and an elevator that never worked. Fear. Fear that ruled my childhood like an iron fist. All brought home to me by a damned bug two inches long. Four inches. Maybe six. The thing was big. But I digress.

PTSD opens the door to reacting from a place of fear, not rationality. When fear rules, no matter what your rational mind tells you, your subconscious is in charge of the machine that rules your life. Fear is what turns people into machines that can hurt and kill. Because without a developed reason to guide the fear response, the child learns to shut down the fear by turning off the emotions pushing the fear to a fever-pitch. The child becomes cold. And that cold is what keeps me on the outside of everything. Every group, every class, even outside my own marriage sometimes. It's like a thin barrier between me and the world. I needed it to survive, but now I can't make it go away. It would be like trying to learn to breathe another way. The only thing I can do is wait it out. Because I can't insulate myself from the bugs and the jolts of life that just happen.

ptsd

Wolfpack 79, that other ranked team, 58

2006-01-03T17:03:00.000-05:00

Oh what a lovely game it was. About eight minutes into the second half, Richard sighed in contented, game-winning bliss and said, "God, I love this team." About eight minutes left to go, you could see it in the eyes of the George Washington players: frustration, defeat, the looks that said "Please God, let this game be over." And in the eyes of our guys: nothing but game, game, game, baby. Over the course of these 12 games I've just felt something palpable coming off them, something different than they've had over the course of the last few seasons; a unity that was missing before. There is no disconnect between the players on this team. There are scoring droughts, and there are those times when there are still no offensive rebounds (!it just drives me bats, but I need something to rant about, don't I?), but on the whole, there is never that offensive panic, that Julius-Hodge-possessed need to break out of the game and take it on one's self and disrupt the team and, well, disconnect the wires. Now, they are all wired. That whole "one heartbeat," psuedo-socialist vibe of Herb's must be working. My team is jamming! UNC - all the UNCs - are going down this week! It's payback time!

nc state wolfpack

Finally! Engin Atsur gets what he deserves!

2005-12-21T10:12:00.000-05:00

Princely recognition. A nicely written article that actually talks about his talent not his country. Prepare for patriarchal domination, Bama.

nc state wolfpack
Engin Atsur

Iowa outlasts Wolfpack, 45-42

2005-12-01T18:54:00.000-05:00

Given the current miserable state of my physical existence, Wolfpack basketball has been one of the nicest high points . . . including the loss last night to Iowa which was, to put it mildly, more painful to watch than my spasmodic GI tract. Painful because our guys had such a tough night and battled so hard. I think Engin Atsur had what could arguably be the first bad game of his ACC career; the man who could do no wrong couldn’t do anything right in Big Ten Country; he couldn’t steal, he couldn’t pass, he couldn’t cut half the damned time and nobody fed him the three (which was probably smart, given the state of our shooting, which was colder than the temperature outside the building, a rumored 20 degrees). He actually had three fouls about three minutes into the second half, and he just does not foul. Not only did most of our shots not go in, they bricked so loud on the rim that they echoed in the damned stadium and out the television speakers like death knells. Iowa had our number – they clamped us down and bit into us and never let go. But! But . . . neither did we. We had their number, too. We bit back and hung in. Two years ago, our team would have let a team like this walk all over us and put us in the hole by fifteen or nineteen points that we would then spend the rest of the game clawing out of unsuccessfully. About eleven months ago, our team probably wouldn’t have managed to claw back at all. But THIS TEAM didn’t let them get away, never got into a huge hole, and stuck it out. Even though it seemed to take them the first thirteen minutes of play to trust each other and their own offense, once they bit down, they did not let go for a second and they played their hearts out. Not once did they look defeated. They kept clawing back, they kept up a killer defensive pace, they never wore down. Not until the last second, and it just didn’t fall. And that’s all.

nc state wolfpack

Pain lays bare the wound

2005-11-02T09:57:00.000-05:00

Tuesday I had a CAT scan of my abdomen and pelvis. To prepare I had to stop consuming solid foods after seven in the morning (my test was scheduled for 1:50 p.m.), and then at 11:50 I had to drink a contrast solution that tasted like refrigerated, canned boiled milk. That morning right after breakfast I had this lucid, perfectly clear moment when there was no pain, when I thought that the pain was subsiding, that perhaps it really was some kind of “phantom” gall-bladder attack pain that some of the nurses I’ve encountered have told me about, or depression manifesting itself physically, or merely gas. Then it came back, of course. Why else would I be writing about pain?

At noon my husband called me and said he wanted to come with me for my test after all, so I left early to pick him up and we got to Rex about 1:20. I had to wait until 2:20 for my scan. The nurse who came for me gave me more boiled milk contrast solution to drink and I changed into a scratchy robe for my short journey into a big machine. As I lay on a table sliding back and forth in the machine with my arms over my head the pain was very severe, enough to bring tears, and I could feel my despair, lurking. Sometimes when things get especially bad I can feel my despair getting gleeful, as if it knows I am close to coming within her clammy clutches again, but I know where that road leads and I won’t let her win. I pull myself back from her brink and I look up at the top of the machine, and its digital readouts, and I wonder if this industrial marvel, manufactured by Philips, with its automated recorded voice telling me to “breathe in and hold your breath” and “now breathe” will actually find the answer to my pain.

When I get home there is a message from my PCP’s office telling me the quickest they could get me in to a gastroenterologist is November 14^th – two whole weeks away – and despair rears up her ugly head and the thoughts come flooding in. They are the ones that want to convince me that there is never going to be an answer to this pain and that this is now my life: housebound, unable to think straight, unable to do anything at all. My cats love that I am home but I do not. I want to be back at work, I want to be learning something at school, I want to be working at my life! Not sitting here, unable to do much at all except get exhausted with my self and circle around my own thoughts, unable to escape. When I get on my cushion I can’t escape those thoughts which coalesce around my physical pain so that my emotional pain and my physical pain are one wound and my wound is my life entire and I can’t get back to my breath at all. I give up and go for a walk instead, and later I read from Chogyam Trungpa’s Training the Mind about the main practice of developing compassion, a concept that seems far removed from where I am in the present time – a wounded person full of pain. How can the wounded have compassion for anything when all it can do is cry out in pain? Trungpa explains that all of us have an outer wound and an inner wound, a “soft spot” or sore spot that is like a pimple or an achy bump that we don’t want to touch or rub too much because it hurts. It’s there on our skin and we avoid touching it and try to protect it from being hurt but it gets continually bumped by life and it’s always aching, reminding us that it’s there. This sore spot is actually the entry point for other people in our life – it’s the entry point where we become affected by events and other people; where we fall in love with people, where we become amused and delighted and excited and upset by life. It’s a sore spot we try to protect when we get hurt by love or life, that we try to brick over, but we can never succeed because it is a fundamental part of us, an essential part of being human that we cannot change no matter how hard we try to become. Besides that soft outer wound, we also have a soft inner wound, our heart that is bruised and hurt on the inside, the part of us that remembers our pain and anguish and actually physically smarts when we are caught up in the act of remembering it. It never seems to heal – it is like an open wound on the inside of us. Trungpa says that when the inner wound and outer wound meet and recognize the wounds in others, compassion develops.

My realization this morning is that even though I am in the scariest place of my life right now – wounded, in the unknown, not knowing what’s happening to me, unable to change anything, forced to wait for answers, and in pain – this is exactly the condition of all of humanity. There is no resting place.

meditation

Why I am meditating

2005-10-31T17:02:00.000-05:00

I am a beginner at shamatha practice and as such, I feel as if I have just dipped my toes into the water surging at the edge of a vast ocean. When I take my cushion and focus on my breath, my thoughts are so voluminous that it seems like a losing battle to label each one as “thinking” and let it go, for the moment I notice my thoughts another group of them becomes visible and I feel as if I am racing along a whitewater river without a raft, trying to keep my head above water, thoughts threatening to submerge me. I hear snatches of music and rhythm in my head, and sometimes the thoughts collect into pain and I can feel my despair rising. I am starting to learn how my mind works, and sometimes, just at the end of my practice time, I feel a warmth and peace with my mind, my body and my self, such that I don't feel any division between them - I am me at this age and this time in this life.

These are baby steps, so small, but I can feel that universe, that ocean, as within my reach, and before I arise from my cushion I know that I can become an integrated person – someone who is alive in the present and can put the past away where it belongs, and stop waiting for the future. That’s who I want to be. Someone who is alive in the now, and not waiting for my life to happen anymore.

meditation

Queen of Pain

2005-10-29T09:43:00.000-05:00

I have had a tumultous week, and most of it has been while sitting still. I have been racked with abodominal pain that is at times so severe I want to scream. I saw another doctor at my PCP Monday and had some bloodwork done to check for infection, and finally came home for good Tuesday after yet another abdominal ultrasound, which failed to find anything. Wednesday I pressed Capital Surgical to see me and after talking back and forth with the nurse most of the day they pushed me into Rex again for a HIDA scan, which checked me for a leakage from my common bile duct into my intestine – a possible complication from my cholecystectomy; it was normal. Thursday I had a consult with them, and they told me they had done everything they could do for me and that they were sending me back to my PCP and recommending a gastroenterologist, who might want to do a “scope (ECRP)” as well as check for other things going on like gastritis, which I think is the generic gastrointestinal condition you are diagnosed with when no one knows what’s wrong with you, kind of like that mysterious “pharyngitis.”

Friday I went back to my PCP and spent a long few hours there. He asked me a lot of questions and we went into detail about my pain, my other symptoms like constipation and nausea, and my history of abdominal complications especially my surgery for fibroids. They gave me a pelvic X-ray and found that there was excess stool in my bowel, and after a post-void catheterization (doesn’t all of this sound lovely? I mean, talk about the thing you don’t ever want to go through in your life, having some one climb through your bowels to find out what’s wrong with you has to be on the top of the list) which was normal, the doc decided to send me for a pelvic ultrasound to check for the possibility of endometrial tissue complicating matters. When I had my myomectomy, the fibroid had grown through my uterus into my abdomen, and most women who have grown fibroids grow them again. Since that conversation, I can’t get this image out of my head: fibrous growths rearing out of my uterus and digging through my intestines, wrapping themselves around my colon and taking root like some alien invaders out of a horror movie. He also gave me some industrial-strength laxatives and Ultram for pain – hallelujah. It doesn’t take it totally away but it takes the edge off it enough that I can think a little. A very little though. I get so tired. I’m getting tired now, writing this. I want to curl up in a ball and die.

Media day is here, basketball is right around the corner,

2005-10-14T14:24:00.000-05:00

and that makes losing football that much easier to take. I was thrilled to listen to Herb Sendek's press conference this afternoon: no mention of chopping wood, not even one time; surfing right past the "who is the new leader on the team" question; had to laugh when Coach mentioned Julius' new-found publicity on the NBA network. Hubby and I watched Jules in training camp the other day, and Julius is still out there representing NC State. Jules' debut on the "Real Training Camp" show was when the general manager pointed him out and said "Julius Hodge - first guy here every day." It's just a little bit longer to wait, right? Go Wolfpack!

Something of an answer

2005-10-14T14:07:00.000-05:00

Dr. Dicks doesn't know if 675 will be offered in the spring but should know by January. I've decided to enroll for the spring and see what happens. Dr. Dicks thinks I may have to take 515 and 675 in the fall and take 518 in the spring, but I won't be doing that. 515 and 518 will be offered in the fall as far as he knows. All this is very nebulous. The reason 675 may not be offered in the spring of '07 is that there may be only 3 students who want to do 675, and the people "upstairs" (administration) won't let Dr. Dicks offer the course. This is where the rubber meets the road, and gets stuck, at NC State and where I get so bloody frustrated. It's such a frustration, but the bureaucracy always wins. But I'm not fighting it, and I'm not waiting it out, either. I'm just not going to enroll, and I'm going to leave that path behind. I'm going to take it as a sign that I belong somewhere else, and that's it. The more I think about it, I just have to breathe it out, and let it go. I thought hard about going back to the CTU webmaster program, but that's not me either. I just don't have the patience for the programming/software side of it. I like the writing, and figuring out the architecture and the story of what I want to say, and I like figuring out the projects. I like marketing. Perhaps graduate school is just not meant to be for me, and that's it. I've done okay without it so far. I always felt like it was the missing piece in my life, but maybe that's all just bullshit. Maybe my life is just fine the way it is. Maybe I am already where I am supposed to be.

Not an answer, but the next step in the path

2005-10-12T19:56:00.000-05:00

Right as I was finishing up my last post this afternoon, I received an email from E-Ching that the MSTC program had made the decision to allow some MS students to do their 675 project in the fall of '06, but that this means that 675 will not be offered in the spring of '07. To say that this made me upset would be a gross understatement. I was unable to get into ENG 515, a required course, this past semester despite wanting very much to take advantage of the fact that Stephen Katz was teaching it, because I will not be graduating in the spring of '06. I could have taken 518, but given my work load, the desire to also take 514, another rhetoric course, and the fact that 518 was listed in the course catalog as being available in the spring semester as well as the fall, I made the decision not to take 518 this semester and only take 514, planning on taking 518 this spring. Not being able to take a required course this semester meant by default that I was not going to graduate before spring of '07, another major factor that I took into account. Given the stress of my workload and my subsequent surgery last week, I feel that I made the best decision I could at the time, which entailed a considerable financial burden of another two semesters of school. Now, however, not only is 518 not going to be offered in the spring, but I'm not going to be able to graduate with a degree before fall of '07 at the earliest, if this is in fact the decision the program has made, because I cannot take 675 before taking all of my other required courses, and even if I could, there is no way in hell I would take three required courses in one semester, one of which is my capstone project, and work full-time.

One of the main reasons I chose NC State University is because of the flexibility of the part-time program, and this "flexibility" is the thing that has continually failed me time and time again over these past four sessions. Many of the courses that I might have been very interested to take given my chosen track of study, website design and development, are not offered in the evening, including most of the juicy computer design and development courses like Visual Thinking (would love to take it, but unfortunately marketing needs to take place in the daytime when people, um, work). In place of offering any other required course, my department is offering 519 again (everyone, take Jason's class, it's great) and 508 (usability) - okay, perhaps, but nearly redundant given the fact I have already taken 519. Granted, we didn't go in-depth into usability factors, but it could be argued that most of what we did in 519 centered around whether or not websites actually worked.

Advising sessions are usually only offered during one evening session and, oddly enough, always seem to get filled up by TAs who don't have real jobs and could easily get to campus during the daytime. So every semester, I have to take nearly two and a half hours off of work to come see Dr. Dicks for ten fucking minutes during the day. During the day, it usually takes me 45 minutes to get from RTP to NC State and find a place to park. If I'm lucky. One semester it took me nearly 75 minutes. Can I get a humina humina??? To essentially get from him a piece of paper with a number on it that he could easily have delivered to me via email, which is a form of communication invented about, oh, thirty years ago and which most civilized people employ for necessary communications, so I can bloody register for the classes I can't fucking take.

Jesus wept, as they say in theology circles.

So now, essentially, the MS TC program is making it impossible for me to get a degree in anything like time. Well, this upsets me mightily. I got very mad, then, very depressed, then mad again, then depressed, and now, well I have an appointment with Dr. Dicks tomorrow at which he will either confirm or deny whether or not I can take 675 in the spring of '07. And if I cannot, I'm dropping out of the program. I was at a loss for what to do, but now I'm thinking I will go back to my original idea which was to take the webmaster classes at the computer training unit and fuck all this noise altogether. Because otherwise there would be no way, even if I did get into the PhD program, for me to finish said program before 2010. It would be more like 2012.

No wonder there aren't enough technical communication professors. STC doesn't seem to want any student members, and NC State doesn't seem to want any technical communicators. I think I'd rather find someplace that wants me around.

Home, with staples

2005-10-12T14:12:00.000-05:00

Home, and feeling somewhat better althought not nearly at 100%. I'd say I'm officially at 50%, with reservations. I have four incisions, one in the center of my torso, two on the right-side of my upper abdomen, and one at my navel. The one at my navel and the one at the center of my torso each have three haphazardly-placed staples. I feel like a leftover office memo. My surgery went very well, started earlier than scheduled and was over with within an hour. I suppose I'm happy things went so efficiently. $13,000 later . . . staying at Rex overnight was fine, but of course, I had drugs. Being home has been fine, too. I have not yet experienced cabin fever. I am actually enjoying the time to myself, time to think, time to meditate on my new meditation cushion, time to think about the changes I've been through this year, about where I'm going, where I want to be.

About three months ago I spoke with my shrink about dealing with the part of my PTSD that brings me up against horror and despair by trying to live in the moment when it happens, instead of trying to push it away. I told him that since my suicide attempt in 1999, I had found great strength and courage in reading Rilke's Duino Elegies, and others of his poems when he talks about pain being a gift because it is one of the few times when we as humans live fully in the present. The other, of course, is joy. Pain, physical pain especially, refuses to allow us to consider the future or the past. It just is, and it takes over, relentless, and fearing that total control, that relentless present, we seek refuge from it. It's why pain medications are our number one addiction . . . we want to avoid pain more than anything in the world. Anyway, since studying the Duino Elegies I began to approach the episodes of my life when my memories returned - often in the middle of the night, often dressed as monsters but most often just nakedly themselves, awful all on their own - by refusing to run away from the pain. I just sat in it, I let it come in to me and wash into me and over me and through me. I will face my fear. And by facing it, and letting it come, I found that the episodes were much shorter, and I could survive them much easier if I just let them come, and then go.

After that discussion, my doctor gave me a cd of a talk by Pema Chodron, a Buddhist nun who (I have learned) has been successful at translating Buddhist thought for Westerners. The cd was about tonglen meditation, which seeks to heal pain by accepting it and transforming it with our own health. Since listening to that cd a few times, I have begun an interesting journey. I've bought a few of Ms. Chodron's books, a book on breathing meditation, and a book by Sakyong Mipham Rinpoche called Turning the Mind into an Ally. I've also purchased a set which includes a zabuton, which is a square mat, and a zafu, which is a round cushion, on which to sit and meditate comfortably, and I've been trying to do it. So far it has been an interesting exercise. When I first started thinking about meditation, I thought my goal of mine would be to become more at peace with myself, but now I don't think I have a goal per se. I just want to see where all this goes. Yesterday I found myself digging around the Shambala website and finding out more about the Durham center. I think I will find an instructor there to help me.

I don't know if this means I'm going to become a Buddhist. I don't know what it means. I only know that I think I can break through to the other side of PTSD. I believe I am what my doctor would call a "highly functioning PTSD subject." I believe I am someone who is not in danger of ever getting back to the suicide watch ward at what used to be North Raleigh Community Hospital. But what else am I? One of the things that I've already found out via meditation is that I really need to achieve two things in my life before I die, or I won't be happy with myself: I really want to have a house, and I want to learn to sing. Neither of which have a damned thing to do with my current course of action at NC State.

As much as I have been "studying" meditation and peace, I find myself just as ready to slip into frustration, thanks to NC State. There are no required courses in my program being offered in the spring other than the capstone course, which I'm not taking. Dr. Dicks also sent out an email to the MS students the other day that said that not everyone who wanted to take 675 in the spring was going to get to do it. I can only imagine I am not the only one who wants to knock something over. Because none of the other required courses are being offered in the spring, I'm going to have to take two required courses together next fall, 518 and 515. (If they are offered, that is. Who knows at this point?) As I do every time another advising period comes back up, I go back to the MS Tech Comms website and re-think what I'm doing. I'm really not a technical communicator; I just communicate via technology. However, I do want to continue to develop websites. I wonder if I should switch to the MBA program, or the MS in Communications, instead. I still love working in marketing. I like tinkering with the farrin website, and I like writing marketing collateral and working on marketing projects. But I'm still intrigued with this communicating via technology thing. If I keep going forward, and managed to get into the PhD program, I could probably finish by the time I'm 46 years old, leaving me with a decent 20-years to have a teaching career. But I still can't decide, and I still don't know why. And unfortunately, I'm not going to get to take another required course in my major program which will help me decide, until next fall, when I'll practically be done. Even though it's over a year away, I still don't have the foggiest idea what I would do with my 675 project and quite frankly, as much as I like websites, building another one doesn't seem like much of a challenge. It seems downright boring. I've already proved I can do that professionally. Doing it for a degree seems beside the point. Taking ENG 514 (History of Rhetoric) has been interesting, fascinating, and great, but I definitely don't want to be an English teacher. I always thought I belonged in words, but maybe that's just one of the many places I belong. Perhaps I can meditate my way to an answer.

What we have here is . . .

2005-10-02T06:57:00.000-05:00

The Raleigh News & Observer published the first in a five-part series today on regional rail in the Triangle, entitled “Triangle Trains: Off Track?” The gist of today’s article was that the project is under threat from increasing federal scrutiny of it’s ridership forecasts. It’s easy to see why this project is going “off the rails” when one looks at the proposed map of the trains. What we have here is an utter failure of imagination. It makes me sadder than I can say. Because the trains are being built right where the riders aren’t.

The Triangle is well on its way to becoming Atlanta. When 540 is completed, it will already be too late. The suburban sprawl will be crowding the borders of that freeway before all its asphalt is down and we’ll have to plan another loop. Next stop: annexation. Hell, ESPN anchors already mistakenly call this area “Raleigh-Durham.” What’s to stop the cities from merging? (Besides, as a State fan, I can’t help but feel the world can do without Chapel Hill, but I digress).

Only a blithering idiot can fail to see that the growth of our area is happening in South and East Wake County, Northeast Wake County, Johnston County, Wake Forest, and Creedmoor, and that the bulk of these developments are lower-to-middle class income settlements where the houses are actually affordable for real people. It’s also swelling south of Cary down Fuquay way. Just where 540 is going. Why didn’t the planners of the freeway get together with the planners of the railway? The railway planners planned a downtown-as-center model taking advantage of existing rail. I’m sure they congratulated themselves for doing so. They completed ignored the suburban-to-urban commuter model in which people park-and-ride. Part of the new system is supposed to be an upgrade of what I believe are five separate bus systems serving the greater metro area which makes getting from one part of this sprawl to another an exercise in absolute futility. I looked into taking the bus from home to class, until I found out it would take me over an hour and a half to get from Six Forks and Millbrook to NC State by bus. As my grandmother used to say, these are the same kind of people that put Christ on a cross.

Obviously the railway planners took the path of least resistance: existing rail lines, which run between the downtown centers of Raleigh and Durham, where richer people now live and continue to gentrify. If the cities manage to stop it I’ll eat my Durham Bulls hat, but I’m digressing yet again. There are few to no train stations planned where poorer people live and are moving in ever-increasing numbers. The rail is going straight through RTP, in order to take advantage of existing rail lines. It’s going to be a commuter rail for people who live in the nicer suburban areas (Cary, let’s just be blunt about it, shall we?). Instead of making a railline for probable users, the TTA designed a railline of least resistance, and is going to let the poorer people fend for themselves. They plan, apparently, to take the harder route of preaching to people who live close to RTP to abandon their cars and take the trains, while people who live in Northeast, Southeast and Eastern Wake who are more likely NOT TO HAVE CARS AND USE RAIL will have to continue to take a bewildering and time-sucking route on buses if they want to save money (or have to use public transport because they don’t have a car). I imagine most of the TTA budget will be used to market to the richer people the advantages of giving up their cars instead of to the poorer people the advantages of using public transport to get around: the poorer people who actually need the trains.

I believe the ridership estimates will sink the TTA project because they have to be based on the existing bus routes in the area of the rail, which SUCK and are practically non-existent because people there don't want or need the bus; they drive Lexuses and Hummers, for God's sake. Surely they did not take into account the bus routes in Northeast and Southeast Wake nor the commuters who live in Wake Forest, Wilson, Johnston county, etc., etc., etc., who might be persuaded to give up their cars if there were convenient stations NEAR 540 where they could park their cars, get on trains safely, and get to work. Somebody failed to see this among the trees and the land where 540 would go, and looked at the existing rail roping through the pricey land in Cary instead. Somebody saw today’s dimes, getting money out of the federal government by "taking advantage of existing resources" and left tomorrow’s dollars. Somebody had no imagination, and our reward will be concrete. I’m sad, because I liked taking the train to work in Chicago. It had benefits that I could go on about for several paragraphs: it was safer, easier, more convenient, cheaper, and brought me more of the city of Chicago than I would have ever seen had I gotten around it in a car. It had its downsides: there are always members of the public one would rather not get up close and personal with. But I think about how I miss it sometimes when I go to work at a personal injury law firm that deals with car accidents. There are an average of 600 car accidents a week in our metro area. Imagine a world without that to worry about. TTA didn’t, and now rail is going to fail. Imagine that.

I have not been blogging. because I have been sick.

2005-09-25T18:12:00.000-05:00

I did not know I was sick, just that I was tired, gaseous and nauseous. For the past six months I've had a lot of back pain which I thought was due to the soft tissue injuries I sufferd in my car accident last year. I went back to my physical therapist and we've been working on it. For the past six weeks or so the nausea and the fatigue got worse and worse. I went to my family doctor who made a list of things that could be wrong. At the top of the list was gallstones, as I possess all three risk factors for them: I'm about forty (39 and holding, thank you very much), I'm still overweight (and haven't been able to lose any weight much of this year either, another reason I went back to the doctor) and I'm fatigued. Well, there you go. We scheduled an ultrasound on the 16th, which was a very painful experience, and last Wednesday I found out that I have three round little buggers sitting in my gallbladder as we speak.

So, gallstones. I have to have surgery, what's known as a laparoscopic cholecystectomy. I will most likely be out of work about a week or so which shouldn't be too bad. I'm glad to know what's wrong. Since the diagnosis I've felt even more pain, if that's possible. I don't know if that's psychosomatic or just what's been there that I've been trying to repress and not deal with, that I am now no longer able to pretend is not there, but it hurts. Waaah.

The major difference in my life this semester is that despite being back into crunch time, with schoolwork and work work and my hair on fire, which normally makes me happy as a clam, I've felt increasingly tired and unable to keep up, like I've been a quart low. Despite the fact that things have been going great at work and in fact are getting down right exciting, I felt like I couldn't think and couldn't function half the time. I didn't want to think I was suddenly feeling old, for Christ's sake. At least now, I know what's wrong. I want them out of me now so I can get back to making myself fit and living my life. Dammit. But right now I'm just so tired.

On blogs and anniversaries

2005-08-31T19:46:00.000-05:00

Today is Blog Day, to which I've committed to sharing five blogs with the blogosphere. So I'm sharing the following:

John Martin's A Day in the Life: because I digress, often, and John understands that. It's so important to be accepted for the ditz one is. John has been blogging for at least five years, I believe, and has been working in the "new" field of information technology for over 25. He is one of my brilliant classmates in the Tech Comms program at NC State, and inspires me with his commitment to blogging, often, and his commitment to excellence in his classes. He always gives 110% to class and that pushes the rest of us to work harder and get the most out of our education. Or else why do it? John is also uncompromisingly himself. Thanks for blogging, John.

Jason Swartz' coherent fragments: because Jason is blogging, hurray! His blog is turning into an experiment about experiments in networking, writing, and communicating via electronic space . . . I think. His class on Online Information Design at NC State was challenging, interesting, fun, and timely. Also he is a music geek, too, which is cool.

Kevin Smith's My Boring-Ass Life: I'm really glad Kevin Smith is blogging, even though he doesn't quite the immediacy of the medium. He's been journalling, and then posting entries a week at a time. I love his writing, but the immediacy goes right out of it, so it feels deflated. I want to encourage him though. Go visit his blog and tell him to blog DAILY.

Dave Pollard's How to Save the World: I do not always agree with Pollard, but his thoughts are always complex and challenging and he shares them often. Sometimes it is hard to keep up with him, but he always presents ideas with fresh perspectives and a healthy dose of "why not?"

Ear Fuzz: A blog about music by four guys who live in London, Berkeley, San Diego and Montreal. They post about music old and new and share a lot of music with the world. I love the concept of mp3 blogs, and I'd like to set up my own if I could figure out how to do it the way they do it - and if I had the time to figure it out. I think I'd do a bunch of world music on mine. Lately they've been posting a lot of funk from the 60s and 70s along with the science they're dropping. To use an old-hat expression, their shit is dope.

By Lloyd Lemons: A marketing writer. You know, I do this stuff for a living, too, and I've read a lot of crappy marketing blogs. Lloyd and Hugh MacLeod are the guys I read everytime they post. Oops, and that's six. It's good to give.

Today was our one-year anniversary. We decided to always celebrate it by going someplace we had never been before. Tonight we went to Gino Russo's Oyster Bar in Raleigh. I liked it, nice atmosphere, at least while we were there. I can't vouch for karoake because I'd rather barf than sit through that. When we were walking out a guy in a tux with tails was walking in and I thought, "this place might get strange here in a minute." I did think, though, that for the quality of the food the prices were a bit on the high side. Although they did a fabulous job on my Chilean Sea Bass, and the caesar salad dressing was to die for, Richard's lobster tail was a bit tough and dessert was just ordinary. A very attractive interior with a beautiful floor and color scheme. Probably one thing that kind of made it hard was being distracted by the bar tv which had non-stop Katrina disaster on. It's hard not to feel enormously guilty when you are dry, comfortable, and eating sea bass while people are without homes, food, water, or future. 2.3 million people without power. There's just no words for what's going on down there that aren't trite, so I won't try. I am still happy to be married, though; and very grateful to be in Raleigh.

Richard and I also agreed that our best experiences during our first year together were going to the NCSU basketball games, and how much we look forward to year 2 of our marriage playing out in 21 or so games in the RBC Center, preferably with lots of stunning, heart-stopping victories.

In the shadow no longer

2005-08-30T09:57:00.000-05:00

I suppose I can understand why no one has faith in Ilian Evtimov. For the past four years, he’s been one of the guys in Julius Hodge’s louder, albeit thinner, shadow. Ilian is slower and the epitome of patience, the guy who could make something happen when no one was looking; Julius was brash, bold, and fell all over himself to make things happen just when everyone was paying attention. Ilian did not push out there and make mistakes. Julius pushed out there and made mistake after mistake, and we loved him for it. Ilian was out on the perimeter making threes and eyeballing the defense, watching for holes; Julius was pushing in the paint and creating holes. Ilian spent a year on the bench in a cast and another year with big heavy braces on his knees and lots of questions. Last year, when Julius seemed unable to make anything happen, Ilian did not seem to step up to the spotlight in the eyes of some. He is constantly being labeled as bigger and slower, European, quieter, as if this in someway makes him a lower-caliber player than Julius. Writers talk about the four languages Ilian speaks as if he’s a museum exhibit – our European player, look what a strange specimen he is - and continue to push him to the outside; a subtle but powerful marginalization. I’m sure he’s quite sick of being asked if his knees are alright, and being asked When? When are you going to . . . ? When is Ilian going to step up?

And so, with the departure of Julius and basketball season still a few months away but schedules released and tickets on sale, we have sportswriters, who can’t think outside any box other than the ones they create, starting to ask the obvious question: who takes Julius’ place? As if Ilian is not already standing there. Okay, one sportswriter so far, but I’m pretty sure he’s not going to be the only one.

What I find sad about all of this, besides the obvious ignorance of Ilian’s talent which is prodigious, is that Ilian is not seen as unique in the same way that Julius is viewed, when he obviously is. He is obviously different than most of the players in the ACC. He has overcome what is perceived as weaknesses by creating (and even resurrecting) shots and opportunities based on what he can do, and learned ways to capitalize on his strengths.

When we go the games we get there early because I like to watch the drills. I like to see the players and what they are working on, and the expressions on their faces. Are they paying attention, or are they all over the place? Are they focused, or looking into the stands for someone with a camera? And what are they doing? Are they hitting their shots? At every pre-game drill last year, Ilian was working on that old-school baby hook, or reverse layup, or whatever the hell it’s called, and making threes, and concentrating with this furrowed look of intensity; always standing out because he was doing something different. He also always watches the other players and knows exactly where they are. And when he’s on the court during regulation, and he pulls those no-look passes as if he’s got eyes in the back of his head, that’s why. Ilian has cultivated his differences and made them work for him. He hasn’t tried to mold himself into an “American” player, whatever that is. He is himself; that’s artistry. Last year, after all of the games, Tony Haynes is always interviewing him, because he understands the system and he knows where it didn’t work or did work. He understands the game objectively and he doesn’t take things personally, especially when the team doesn’t perform. I can’t look into the locker room to see how this translates into leadership. But it’s time for the team to respect his smarts, even if the writers, and even most of the fans, can’t. He’s been there the longest and he knows what they have to do to make it work.

So where am I going with all of this? I think Ilian is a great player, and a confident player, but one who existed, because he didn’t have much choice, in the shadow of someone whose billing was set before he even stepped foot on campus in Raleigh. And now that the shadow has disappeared, I believe he is going to shine out brightly. I believe it will be his difference that will shine out, because it couldn’t be seen before, and I believe he can take a lot of people by surprise. Just like the end of last season, we are going to be the team that nobody takes seriously until it’s too late. Ilian is going to be the major reason why.

Just get some sleep and be yourself, Ilian, and everything else will work itself out.

Boss Tool for JobSeekers

2005-08-10T18:17:00.000-05:00

Indeed is a job site that is free for jobseekers. Advertisers pay for their ads based on clicks. It pulls from all over the internet. Best of all, you can subscribe to your favorite job searches via RSS feed and pull the results into your blogreader, like I do with Bloglines, or MyMSN, or MyYahoo!, or any other service. I found 264 jobs for with "PhD" and "technical communications."

This tool is just plain brilliant. I would think it would be a very good tool for advertisers too.

Blogday

2005-08-10T12:27:00.000-05:00

I will be blogging on BlogDay 2005 and posting about 5 blogs that I like. If you have a blog or know of cool blogs you want other people to know about, consider doing it yourself.

I have to rant, I just have to . . .

2005-08-08T18:58:00.000-05:00

. . . because when I ask for help from a help desk I want friggin' HELP. I don't think this is so much to ask.

I have been the STC webmaster for two months now. It took six weeks for the administrator of student organizations to get our student organization listed as an active organization. It took two weeks, once that happened, for the IS Help Desk to add my unity ID and password to the organization's webspace permissions so I could access the webspace. Throughout this ordeal I continually asked WHERE exactly that webspace was. Emails have flown back and forth, but slowly. Like albatross slow.

I found out on a Friday evening that my id and password would now allow me access to the webspace to edit files. Still no word as to where in the hell that webspace is exactly. I think, okay, I will just go digging for it. Big mistake. I go digging and get continually hung up and have to log off and log back in and search some more. Imagine how many webspace users there are at North Carolina State University. I'll give you a hint: 35,000 students (thank you). Among all the folders that I just spent half an hour navigating is not ONE labeled "student organizations" or "student orgs" or any other variable thereof.

It's a simple friggin' question! I sent an email back Friday night asking for help to access the webspace. I figured I just needed to know the folder name so I could access via ftp. I get back (three days later - you know, some people don't work weekends. Like, I don't know, all of NC State University, apparently. But I digress . . .) canned instructions for how to navigate the folders on the unity folder via ftp and lots of nice links to software that I already have and am quite aware how to use. In the words of the great Charlie Brown . . . I can't stand it!

So I'm sending another email back. Hopefully I'll get an answer back by the end of the week. The website is ready to go. Has been for nine weeks now. Jeez. Please, can I get a folder name? How hard is this question? Is anyone in help actually helpful?

Breathe deep and imagine yourself in a place where people actually work for a living. Aaaahhhhh.

Waste some time

2005-08-06T10:49:00.000-05:00

This is not an ad. It's something called internet art. Big fun.

The upside of anguish

2005-08-05T08:40:00.000-05:00

I received a link to this article in the Christian Science Monitor today because I have a Google news alert set up for anti-depressant medications of all types. Because anti-depressant use is so prevalent in our society, I regularly receive alerts for articles that have no direct relevance on the content I produce on drug recalls and other news for farrin.com. When Tom Cruise was in attack mode on the "pseudo-science" of psychiatry, I got about fifty alerts a day on that topic (and Brooke Shields' reaction, and psychiatry's reaction, and a million blog posts about the topic, but I digress), for example.

Why are we all so unhappy? I had reason to ponder this Wednesday night while I was channel-surfing from my comfy couch. Richard was playing Strat-O-Matic and I was catching up on quality time with my cats, who have been spending a lot of time yelling at me lately. I come home from class and it's whine whine whine (but it sounds like, miaow miaow miaow). But anyway . . . There wasn't a damned thing worthwhile on tv - it's the summer and it's all reality show re-runs. I flipped to the music channels - MTV2, MTV16, whatever . . . something called Fuse. There were a bunch of hip-hop shows on. I flipped around for about half an hour watching rap videos, marveling at the fact that videos have gone absolutely nowhere since somewhere in the mid-80s. At some point, videos stopped innovating anything. They are all bright, shiny, brilliant wastes of cash. Every single rap video I saw had three or four guys in long shorts and longer bling, lounging by pools or cruising in expensive cars. Women in bikinis (well, if you could call it that. There was no real fabric. They were more like judicious use of strings wrapped around flesh) strolled around in impossible heels (those are the kind that women cannot actually WALK in). The songs were about getting laid, getting high, and getting paid. They were so boring I nearly fell asleep.

When did rap get so commercial it's boring? Lord, I'm sounding old. But that's not what I want to rant about. It's the pointlessness of it all. The pointlessness of trying to achieve THAT -- whatever that is -- instant cash, a ridiculously expensive car you can't actually drive anywhere, not at the speeds for which it is designed anyway, women doing nothing but getting tanned and objectified, more jewelry, cash, multiple phones, lots of hats and pants. What's the point? No wonder all the people in the videos look, well, bored. It is boring. Life is only worthwhile when it's interesting, and it's only interesting if it's hard. If it's challenging. If you use your brain. If you make mistakes. If you fuck up repeatedly, fall down, get back up.

I went to Chavis last night for the championship game. It was great. People getting all worked up for what is, essentially, not worth much in the eyes of the world. By "the world," I mean the money-seeking materialistic machine that we all get caught up in. There's nothing essentially worthwhile about winning a summer rec league championship. What do you get, in the end? Bragging rights, a bunch of kids thinking you're a hero. Oh, and maybe passing on the passion for the game of basketball. The passion of learning a skill, getting good at it, making something happen. Accomplishing a win with nothing much more than your body and your will. On the way home Richard and I talked about the minor-league basketball team Chucky Brown is supposed to be starting up this year (we believe he's coaching; I have to find out more about it). I thought about all the championship dreams in the eyes of all the guys who are trying to make something happen through being ballplayers. About all the guys who don't make it to the NBA. Why would guys play minor-league ball? Why, for that matter, would Chucky Brown bust his ass in a summer rec league? Because it must mean something to him. Something about passing on something that has added to and shaped his life. Something that means more than longer bling and being a star for about five seconds before you fade away.

Something that works better than any pill may ever do. I acknowledge that drugs help psychiatry and they help people get over problems. They helped me get past the horror of my despair. But the upside of the anguish I suffered is that I found other ways to work through it, too. Ways that gave me something to hang on to more than just the quest for mo' money. They were the harder, longer way. And the stronger. MJ eventually got the cars, the jewels, the whatever . . . but if that was the goal I don't think he ever would have gotten out of that high-school gym when he was a sophomore in high school. Do you?

Spread this meme

2005-07-29T15:26:00.000-05:00

Put an ICE contact on your cell phone. This has been spreading from the East Anglian Ambulance Service in Hellesdon, England, UK, and starting to show up on blogs. It's one of those ideas that you can't believe you never thought of, but you didn't. I didn't either, but I put "ICE Day," "ICE Night," and "ICE Work" contacts in my cellphone database once I heard about it. Do it. It will be so responsible of you.

Finishing

2005-07-29T09:10:00.000-05:00

Richard and I went out to see the Chavis games Wednesday night. It was our last chance to see all the Wolfpackers before next week’s playoffs. There was no reason to worry, however, because they will all be playing in those games. Style won the division, and was playing for an undefeated season, which they had no worries about from what we saw, even though we left at halftime. Plastic bleachers plus three and a half hours = numb butt. We had had enough pain by halftime and Style was way up. Anthony Grundy was on fire though. When we left he had sunk four or five of five to six of his three-pointers. He just couldn’t miss. I saw on the message boards yesterday that he ended up with 36 points.

Josh Powell, a Wolfpacker who did not stay in school, got a job with the Dallas Mavericks last week. Great for him, and I hope he does well. It made me wish he had stayed in school.

Of course I wish Josh had stayed and played for us. Our seasons, which have been progressively great, could have been that much greater. Woulda coulda shoulda – I know all about it. With the new NBA regs keeping teenagers out of the league until they are 19, there’s been a lot of sport-talk debate about the pros and cons of the decision. On the one hand, I agree that the guys in question should have the right to profit from their talent, and in college they have no way to profit from their success. College coaches prop up the old tired arguments about the benefits of an education. I realized Wednesday that what’s missing in that debate is the argument that people who finish what they start gain a clear advantage over people who don’t learn early how to finish.

I watched the games Wednesday and I really enjoyed watching our new freshmen recruits on the court. It’s fun to wonder what kind of success they will have and picture them making things happen in our system. As I watched their eagerness to do well, look good in front of the crowd, and learn from the older guys they were playing with, I glanced down at my college ring which I wear every day. My college ring is a symbol representing all the complicated feelings of my college experience. Some of those complicated feelings are painful and still twinge. But on the whole, my college ring represents the first major accomplishment of my adult life, because it is something I garnered wholly on my own.

I look at my high school diploma as a joint effort on behalf of my mother, my teachers and my priests to give me an education and help me grow. I didn’t do it alone. Technically, I didn’t do college alone, either, but it was the first thing I attempted that I was solely responsible for. College is a test on many levels, and one of those tests is how you can succeed given the complete lack of external academic pressure. No one is kicking your butt out of bed to go to class. No one is kicking your butt into the library to do research. And absolutely no one is encouraging you to study and prepare for exams, papers and presentations. You have to do the work on your own, and if you don’t do it, you suffer the consequences and nobody cares if you fail. It’s not their responsibility to either care for you or see that you do well. That’s up to you.

Doing well, succeeding, getting my degree, earning stellar grades and graduating with honors – that was all me. I did that. I did the work, made the sacrifices, gave up the partying (sometimes) and made the extra effort. Now I have something that no one can take away from me. I learned how to succeed.

A lot of hoo-hah was made about Julius Hodge finishing his degree. He does deserve praise for that, and not just because he did what his Mama told him to. He finished something. Julius promised he would win us a championship. He didn’t get us one, but nobody tried harder than him to get it, and he got his team farther than anyone believed, dreamed or even hoped he would. He also has a kind of success that no one can take away from him and no loss, no matter how heartbreaking, can ever diminish. He has achievements under his belt, milestones he achieved with the sweat and determination of his own effort. Learning how to achieve, and having the proof, makes you a different, better person Maybe if Josh had finished what he started, he would be farther in his career than he is now; perhaps not, and indeed, who can say? But finishing what you start gives you a confidence and a shine that enables you to keep on finishing what you start, and keep on succeeding. The guys who leave early, a lot of them don’t get the big paycheck they dreamed about. If they had forestalled the promise of that payday just a little longer, maybe they would have something else right now. A ring that means something. I don’t know if Coach Sendek uses that argument in his living room speeches, but he should. I believe he probably does say it a lot: “FINISH.”

Awesome tool on Google

2005-07-24T16:32:00.000-05:00

Google Print. It's still in Beta.

Meat's back on the menu

2005-07-23T08:05:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure when it happened, but the theology program is back at my alma mater. Some years ago there was word that they were doing away with the minimum theology course requirements and the program back at the Abbey, and I was pretty upset. Not only because well, that was my major when I was there, but just that a private Catholic institution not teaching theology seemed completely contrary to its mission. It may have been just a rumor, but there was little evidence of theology in Abbey communications. Well, it's back now, no matter when it left. I'm thrilled that Fr. Chris is teaching as well. He is the ideal professor for that entry-level class and one of those few who truly belongs in a classroom.

The Abbey has a new website, too, with which I'm impressed, with reservation. It is immediately obvious when visiting the site that the Abbey is different from other institutions, and it should be. You should get the point that it is a Catholic college right away, and I think it accomplishes that with the graphics, content and the pictures of the campus. The Abbey is definitely one place where the architecture and surroundings have much to do with the experience of being there, and I think the designers managed to translate that. Also I think the interface is clean, neat and easy to get around.

There are things that suck about it, however. The search functionality is awful. That may be because it's new and hasn't been knocked around enough. A search for "kirchgessner," Fr. Chris' last name, did not return any page with his name on it. The faculty are supposed to be broken out into divisions, but the divisions link is a self-referrer - there is not an actual divisions listing. Also the entire faculty is in one long alpha list with no breaks or easy way to find a professor by department or name. Sheesh. It's a small place, but still. There is also little or no biographical information about the faculty. I think it's very obvious that this site is brand-spanking new and doesn't have quite the content depth it should. Perhaps this will be remedied over time. God knows they have the money to spend on it. I believe tuition cracked the $20k per year mark several years ago. When I went there room and board was about $12k, so a student is looking at about $34-36k per year to go there. I won't even spend that much on all of my grad school years put together.

Nice article about Chavis, and food for thought

2005-07-13T09:01:00.000-05:00

This one gets all the facts straight. I tagged the wrong Globetrotter, though.

Food for thought on blogs. While the professor remains anonymous, a cop-out, his opinions on blogs and the interview process were sound and really made me think. I've been in a situation where what I wrote in this blog caused an issue at work. We are still tip-toeing around it. I've been tip-toeing since I started this thing. Journals are tricky things, and I am always reminded of the life of Anais Nin when I think about the tension between personal truth and tact. She constantly wrote and rewrote her entries, and really wasn't able to push the whole truth into the world until after she and everyone else in her life were gone. As a writer, and someone who wants to be an artist - I think other people have to recognize you as an artist, it's the height of arrogance to call yourself one with a straight face - I feel the need to push the truth as far as I can despite the harm it might do to other people to hear it, but I'm always pulled back by that. Is it worth hurting the person to push the truth out? In terms of what's happened to me personally, and my struggles with PTSD, I am hoping that the truth that I am able to tell will get the word out to the extent that we can find a way, collectively, to put an end to the circumstances that caused my PTSD - childhood sexual abuse. I know not many people are reading my blog, but by publishing it in a public forum I am opening myself up, allowing the public record to dictate how long my words will be out there. With search engine technology, they could be out there a very long time, and even if I take a website down, it's still published via search engine archives and tools like the Wayback Machine. As much as I might not want it to be true, cyberspace grants permanence to a lot of things that might not deserve such status.

The tension is one of the reasons I don't blog about a lot of the things I'd like to. I like my job, quite a lot, and I have goals at this company I want to reach, successes I want to make happen, that precludes me bitching about the tiny irritations that in the long run are meaningless. Some of the more juicier aspects of my interior life, though, are not going to make it to this blog because I don't want to hurt people. Do I push them aside, and post away? Not if it endangers my professional life to such an extent that I can't afford to publish anymore at all.

"Life is hard. Can't get to heaven on rollerskates, can't take a taxicab to Timbuktu." - Timbuk3

2005-07-12T15:26:00.000-05:00

When I see things like this, I realize how much I love boring, bald, over-intellectualizing, mathematical, priest-behind-the-bench, blind-kid memorializing, never-tell-you-what-he's-really-feeling basketball guru Herb Sendek.

Fire Karl

2005-07-12T15:24:00.000-05:00

Sign Kerry's letter.

My Weekend

2005-07-10T19:03:00.000-05:00

Richard and I went to the games at Chavis Friday night. Evtimov's team creamed their opponents by like 15 points; the guys around me were mad at Evtimov because he wasn't doing "anything" even though he is an "ACC boy." I'm not sure what they meant as he sunk about seven free throws or something, hit one or two big threes and delivered some very artistic assists, including one of my favorites, the behind-the-back no-look pass. The black guys around me seemed to be cheering for his opponents because they were underdogs, that is, mostly white and mostly smaller; I suppose there are some things I will never understand.

Hey, it was cheap entertainment; that's why we were there. I thought Ilian seemed to be having a good time and not taking the game too seriously, which seemed like a good plan on a Friday night when a good portion of the audience was going in and out to partake of mind-altering substances and spending the rest of the time heckling the players non-stop, which was the real entertainment, anyway. The guys in front of me obviously hit a jay at one point, because they reeked a bit when they leaned back towards me, and the man next to me exhaled gin and juice.

The "Men at Work" garage guy, who we found out is named Mike, was there and of course loud, wandering through the crowd to get everyone going by yelling out inflammatory rhetoric (yes, I'm a communications major. So sue me). At one point in the second game one of the guys up against Evtimov hit the deck and didn't get up for a minute, and Mike rushed over and made a big show of picking him up and then everyone clapped. I can't decide if he's the last Harlem Globetrotter to be cut, or the Spike Lee of St. Aug's.

The NC State fans were noticeable because they were mostly white and mostly grouped together. Richard and I sat right near the center so I could see everything in either direction, which meant we were not grouped with the other State fans. We spotted Jordan Collins, Gavin Grant and Andrew Brackman there; Andrew took off with two of his boys midway through the last game of the night, which was too bad because it was the more interesting of the three games. Chuckie and Ced's team mostly held on to the lead but almost lost it there a few times, and the joint was really jumping by the last four to five minutes of the game. One of the guys in front of me, a fan of Style, Chuckie's team, was attempting to entice the "haters" into a little (un) friendly wager by flashing a few twenties and insisting that his $100 bank was "open!" through the final seconds of the game, but nobody took him up on it. Style pulled it out at the end though. I believe they are leading their division and Evtimov's team, the Black Devils, is 4-1. Monday night's 6:30 game should be interesting, as Evtimov's team is playing Reaching Your Goals, the team that Gavin plays on with some of our new freshmen. I'll miss that, though, as I'll be struggling to stay awake in BUS 504. Which is going to be a constant challenge, as its text is the first truly somnolence-inducing book I've ever read.

I've heard people kid that certain books put them to sleep; this one honestly makes me sleepy when I read it. I may keep it at my bedside for the rest of my life it it manages to be this way for the rest of the course. Reading it Saturday night was a real gas. I'd read three paragraphs and yawn three times and have to stop and shake the cobwebs out of my head. Of course, it may just be that patent applications aren't sexy enough to keep me awake, either.

I'm saved in class, at least, because Amelia Vogler and Rick Kissiah, two fellow ETCers, are also in class with me and I think we will maintain a pact to keep each other awake. The professor likes to swath the room in darkness as he drones through his PowerPoint slides, but the spotlights in the ceiling highlight the students enough that truly sleeping is just impossible. Luckily he does let us break once an hour. I've decided to take copious notes to keep myself awake, but the last hour after 9 pm is really hard. The weird thing is that I do feel like I'm learning some interesting stuff. It's just that there is so much of it, and I'm really concerned about doing well in a class in which the first real test of the professor's grading is a midterm that counts for 20% of the final. The exams are all essay and true/false. I'm just bothered that there are no writing assignments to turn in that will give us some idea that we are learning the material as the professor expects us to, and "getting it" before we have to plunge into a test. I do much better on papers than tests. Which is why I'm in an English program, natch.

p.s. Hodge was the leading scorer in his second summer league game. I wish the pictures were a little better.

Hodge Links

2005-07-07T08:23:00.000-05:00

Great article on Jules from the Charlotte Observer, of all places (requires free registration).

Is there a better legacy? When the Wolfpack needed somebody to find an open man, you found him. When N.C. State needed a rebound, you grabbed it. When it needed a stop, you provided it. When it needed an NCAA tournament game-winning basket and free throw, you made them, as Connecticut will attest.

And when your teammates needed a quick lecture, you delivered it. Sometimes you even delivered a lecture when they did not.

Julius in summer school with Luke Schenscher.

Pictures from the Reebok Summer League (none up yet). The Nuggets first game is at 5 pm Vegas time today.

Another one opens the terrible door

2005-07-04T07:06:00.000-05:00

When trauma is experienced, a door to a more primitive self opens in the mind. The door enables the primitive self to take over in order to preserve the person under attack from the trauma. In a healthy, functioning adult, the primitive self can be controlled by behaviorial and societal restraints that remind the adult about the appropriateness of some self-preserving behavior. Otherwise, we'd all be killing each other, but we don't; we put the tiger back into his cage after he's done protecting us.

But consider the mind of a child, which has not yet learned behaviorial and societal constraints. Has not yet learned that ethical issues override self-preserving behavior; that there are consequences from self-preserving actions that can be experienced for a lifetime, like prison, or wallowing in self-doubt, guilt and remorse. That child's mind is a tender, growing place. When trauma opens that door, and the primitive self charges out to protect the child, vital connections in the brain are snapped. The door will not close, and the tiger is left to roam free in the mind. Easily startled.

When I heard the story of Shasta Groene, I knew that another child had been taken by PTSD, and I mourn for her. For what she has witnessed and experienced, she will know a lifetime of grief and suffering. She will always feel apart from other people. She will never really trust or love another human being more than herself, because her first obligation will always be to survive.

My other thought was for the man responsible; a registered sex offender who was released on bail after being charged with murdering another child. I've always had a hard time with this of course; my victimizer was my father and the feelings are complicated. My father did not exhibit signs of being a pedophile, and it's possible that the sexual abuse was an infrequent, and possibly as rare as one instance, event. But sex offenders who have gone as far as killing will not ever stop. They will never stop fantasizing, dreaming, plotting, scheming, and hurting. I hope the Detroit Lakes, MN, PD has a really good reason for letting him go, because they are responsible for the rest of Shasta's life: nightmares, exagerrated startle response, and everything else. I've finally gone over and I agree with Andrew Vachss on this one: they need to be put down like dogs.

On another note, I'm really disturbed to find out that the offender was a blogger.

"When it comes to damage, there is no real difference between physical, sexual and emotional abuse. All that distinguishes one from the other is the abuser's choice of weapons." - Andrew Vachss, "You Carry the Cure in Your Own Heart," Parade, August 28, 1994.

On Helprin

2005-07-01T16:28:00.000-05:00

Harvard Magazine profiled Mark Helprin this past month, a man whom I believe is the greatest living American writer. It is impossible to talk about his books without demeaning them; they are historical, fantastical, super-natural, and superbly literary. Winter's Tale is without a doubt my favorite book ever. It's power and passion never fails to completely annihilate me; for a writer, he is Camelot. Once you read him you realize you will never write anything as beautiful or as powerful, because there can only be one. In Winter's Tale there exists the perfect chapter, entitled "Nothing is Random," that I swear explains everything.

I really didn't know that much about him other than that he went to Harvard. I had no idea he lived in Virginia or that he was such a conservative, but in true Helprin fashion, his conservatism is not easy to explain either. Best to read the article. I can't agree with him on his complete classicism - I think there is much to be found in contemporary art that is worth praising, it just takes some time to dig it out of the muck of popular everything - but please, if you do nothing else in your life, read a book by Helprin. I promise you will be annihilated.

Julius not only gets a job and good press . . .

2005-06-30T14:43:00.000-05:00

he gets the best-dressed award, too. This article is simply hysterical. My favorite quote: "Chris Paul is too good of a ballplayer to get away with a suit this bad." Ouch.

What I learned at Chavis Wednesday night

2005-06-25T17:18:00.000-05:00

to hoop: slang for excellent play, as opposed to everyday play, as in "he can hoop." This is my new favorite basketball expression.
Chicken wings do not impart wisdom upon the inebriated. They don't shut them up, either. A guy wearing the oldest "Men at Work Garage" t-shirt in Raleigh was berating the great Chuckie Brown his entire game, with the same chicken wing in his hand. Chuckie still won, and ran with Gavin Grant and Cedric Simmons the entire game, too. You have to respect that.
To a stat geek, no game is complete without a roster containing lots of numbers on it. So that's what my husband is staring at the entire time we are at games. Chavis ball: no rosters, no stats; result: unfulfilled husband. There I was thinking I had found the perfect activity for him: free sports, Wolfpackers up close. Not even. He said he enjoyed it, but after I pestered him, he admitted he was unhappy because he didn't know who everyone was or whether they were playing the way they usually do. Jeez.
No one gets artistry, even when it's right in their face, four feet away. Case in point: when the Europeans (the brothers Evtimov along with Engin Atsur, still my favorite player) were on the floor, the game became pick-up with finesse. When they were off the floor, it was hot-dogging and hoop-hanging. I am at a loss to explain why the uglier play is somehow better, but it must be a guy thing that I will never understand. I guess points are just everything and poetry is, well, European. But what I really don't understand is why other people who were there insisted the European play was slower and just not as good. I don't get it. I really don't. I would rather see a floating hook shot or an out-of-nowhere back-door cut then one guy hogging the ball. Perhaps I'm European. Bring on the brie.

I am loving me some Hodge

2005-06-20T19:14:00.000-05:00

Whoever gets this guy is going to have a world of fun in life laughing their asses off. I miss him already, man! Whose going to replace this quote master next year?

Richard and I are going to blow off some stress by trying to get into the crowded Chavis League gym Wednesday night to watch some Wolfpackers duke it out. We have no idea where to park. It should be interesting, and hot, as there is no a/c. The second summer session starts in a couple of weeks. I received an email from Dr. Baumer concerning BUS 504. With homework. Already. The man is going to be an animal, I can already tell. He kindly suggested we familiarize ourselves with relevant legal topics (the subject is Technology, Law, and the Internet. Doesn't it just trip off the tongue?) by reading, oh, something like twelve Power Point documents. I'm not kidding. Plus, we already have a case to prepare for the first class. Which, did I mention, is four hours long? Humina humina. Four hours a day, two days a week, five weeks. Lord, give me strength.

I have been giving serious thought to my future in the program, strangely enough because I am now officially even more involved in school since I agreed to become Webmaster for the STC chapter at State (which is going to kick ass this year. John you have to sign up. But I digress). I've been thinking even harder about going for that PhD, and whether or not I can keep up the pace I'm currently running, which is six hours a semester. I thought I was closer to being done, but I was misreading something. I've got 33 hours to complete, not 27, and so I'm not going to be done in the fall of next year. I could maybe finish in December 06, but that would mean really breaking my neck, something that might not work considering we will be buying and then moving into a house in the fall semester, and two classes were a bit of a stretch for me during basketball season (I know, that's sad to admit, but there it is. I need basketball). I can do it by spring of 2007 taking one class per semester if I do at least one semester with two classes.

That puts the pressure off me to try to push in my 675 project when I haven't the foggiest idea what to do. No, that's wrong - I have a great idea, but it's a PhD idea (at least a year of project) not an MS idea (not three months, that is. I won't give away my cool idea, either, so don't ask me). As I was cruising around the Comms department website, I realized that I might want to switch my department, too. Maybe it's just me really trying to push the envelope, or maybe it's just taking the editorial comments for my TC article too seriously (not technical enough, missy!), but I'm wondering if what I'm really interested in is communication, regardless of media. I am interested in websites though. Really interested; I'd really like to make prettier websites without having to be a flash guru. But doing just another website seems, well, boring, unless I really push it, like build a CMS, or a training website, or a digital comic (one idea I had. Really). And pushing it seems impossible, at least next semester. Pushing out my graduation will give me more time to figure out if I want to teach, and perhaps enable me to do a TA the third year. Hmmm. Requires more thought. Also, probably, a talk with the head of the comms department too, don'tcha think?

Well, I've typed enough and I need to send my article in to Dr. Hayhoe. It should publish in November. I hope. Unless it's not technical enough.

Updated blog

2005-06-19T08:44:00.000-05:00

I updated my blog today by changing the template to another Martijn ten Napel design and adding the posts from my previous blogging effort.

The black cloud is not just the rain

2005-06-07T18:36:00.000-05:00

Things have been going hard for a lot of the people around me. Richard's mother fainted and fell over Memorial Day weekend, gashed her head enough to have to require staples, and spent almost a week in the hospital. Things were a bit scary for a while. Heck, they still are.

Female rant alert: squeamish guys might want to skip this next part.

My fibroids seem to be creeping back. My gynecologist recommends a hysterectomy. I'm 38 years old and facing the prospect of never having the option to have children and hey, for an extra-special youngest-customer-on-the-table bonus, early menopause! I'm scared to face those options and scared of going through the pain and terror of dealing with fibroidal symptoms. This weekend reminded me of the times prior to my abdominal myomectomy when I would give birth to clots the size of a clenched fist after hours and hours of excruciating pain. I basically curled up like a baby all weekend, wishing I was dead. Happy, happy, joy, joy.

Richard's company is laying off people. So far he is secure but having ridden the layoff merry-go-round on my previous two jobs, I'm scared for him. I don't know which is worse - having to look for another job when you are trying to be hopeful about your current one, or being the last person off the ride when the lights go out. In the job I held post-9/11, I was one of the last two people laid off after a full year of rounds of shrinkage. In the next job I had (previous to the one I have now) I worked almost a year without having anything to do. And I do mean, not having anything to do. I surfed the net and did stretching exercises for my salary, waiting for the roof to cave in and looking for a job constantly.

Despite all of the bad stuff - and there's more -- my boss' 6-week old baby has a hole in her heart, my PTSD is as active as ever, and more I don't even want to go into -- work has been pretty good. There was something of a self-destruct on my part, during which I found out I'm an overly-sensitive idiot who is doing better than she deserves to be doing, and now I'm in a new office (it's a most beautiful corner, and I love it), my creative work has been successful, and intakes from the internet are rising. Slowly, oh so slowly, but rising. Our traffic went up 24% last month. And the paper I wrote for ENG 512 last year will be published, after some edits, most likely in the November issue of TC. We are still on track to be able to start house-shopping in August or September - we are in approval with NACA - and our marriage is going great. We are almost through our first year and getting closer every day.

There are clouds, and there is silver. No doubt I would never be able to appreciate the one without the other.

Da Jules is picking up momentum

2005-05-27T08:39:00.000-05:00

The great Julius Hodge is getting some serious attention. ESPN's latest mock draft has him going at 28 to the Spurs, which is great, fantastic, and generally awesome in my opinion. The Sporting News had a great full-page pic of Julius a week or so ago and listed him as the top 5 draftees that are being (wrongly) overlooked this year. The blurb said something like, "Hodge doesn't do anything particularly well - except play basketball." I am happy for him and for NC State's other players, as well. This gives them and the program credibility in the eyes of some.

As I've been watching bits of the playoffs, I have been wondering if Ilian and Engin can make it there too. Hubby says it's not likely, but I am holding out the best of hopes. Engin is the next Tony Parker and Ilian is very close to being a Jedi Master of basketball. He's not Ginobili, who just has to be a Jedi - how does he do that stuff in mid-air? He's got to be defying the laws of physics. But I digress - but he is definitely an artist. Next year is going to be great. Fall can't get here fast enough.

Browser Test of Portfolio

2005-04-24T12:02:00.000-05:00

I tested my portfolio in several browsers today using BrowserCam. You can register for a free trial account which lasts about 30 days, more than enough time to test your site in different browsers without having to actually have all the browsers installed on your computer.

Blog Templates

2005-04-24T07:13:00.000-05:00

I've been looking over my old blog today, and the writing is not too bad. I'd like to integrate those old postings with this blog and keep blogging this summer and into next year. To keep chronicling, I guess. I still love that template, so I think during my off time until July, I will move that template over here and integrate all the postings. I'm also going to be working on the website I built last semester in ENG 517 that my husband is using for his Strat-O-Matic baseball league site. Once I handed it over to him, he found a lot of problems with it, mostly because when I re-created it for class, I didn't consult him (a cardinal sin of information design, right?). It turns out that he needs to update certain pages a lot more often than I realized, and he needs a lot of the draft information on one page instead of several. So we will work together to re-create the site. He does like the colors and the menus I created, so that will stay but we will make it workable for what he needs, and turn it into something I'm actually proud to say I created.

My portfolio is also up in its current configuration; can't say how proud I am of it yet, but it works, which feels good. I do not have all of the information up that I wanted, and I'm not too thrilled with the way the information is on the pages - I had envisioned more graphics, pop-up previews of my work, and icons, but I put those things toward the end of my project schedule because I didn't know if I could get to them in time to test it. I'm glad now that I planned it that way, because now it is ready for the hi-fi test and I will have ample time to get my presentation written in time for Thursday night, so I'm not feeling so stressed about volunteering to go then. I understand why so many people wanted to wait until the last minute, but no matter how the hi-fi-test goes, I will have my site done and my presentation over with by 9 pm Thursday night, so I can go watch the State-Carolina game Saturday afternoon and not fidget because I feel the need to be at my keyboard. I'm taking off work Thursday in order to write my presentation and my paper in time for class that night. I'm planning on getting the first draft of my paper done Thursday and then refining it over the weekend so I can turn it in Monday.

All in all I am happy with the way this semester turned out. I think I will have a better grade in BUS 543 than I thought because I knuckled down and did the extra-credit work to pull up my problem set grades, and I am convinced that our team has done the best work on our Team Project. Of the presentations that have been given so far, ours seems to be the first to be coherent and hang together as a whole. It's obvious that our early coordination and attacking of this project worked in our favor. Instead of scrambling to finish at the end of the semester, we were more than ready to go over four weeks ago, and only had to do some refining and tweaking while we prepared our presentation. We did such a good job of putting the paper together early (we set a deadline for ourselves of mid-February to finish the paper, which was a few weeks earlier than required). If I have Team Projects in the future, I am going to remember this and push hard at the beginning to get started right away. It is so nice not to be panicking anymore about the last stretch, like I did last semester, because I was pre-emptive. A good lesson to re-learn.

Project Status

2005-04-23T16:55:00.000-05:00

I've reserved the usability lab on Wednesday night, April 27th, from 7:30 to 9:30. I've agreed to help Jerry test his portfolio and he'll test mine. My husband is also going to be a victim, er, I mean volunteer, tester. If anyone else would like to jump on the bandwagon, just come over to the lab during those hours. I may not be there the entire 2 hours, but I'll stay and help anyone test their site who can make it during those hours.

I have all the pages of my site built and linked, and I have the "for students" section done. I am still working on the portfolio pages. I am not going to get all the docs onto the site I had hoped to feature, but I will at least have one doc on each page. I ended up abandoning some of the ideas I had after the lo-fi test. When my student tester (my husband, cleverly disguised) couldn't find what I asked for, I changed the navigation around. After I changed it, I realized that there was really one basic idea I wanted to get across for students, and I could provide two simple examples and then allow the students to browse through the portfolio if they wanted. However, I could get the basic information I wanted to convey into three pages for students.

If I had more time and energy I think I could very easily expand my site. I could certainly give it more wow if I had the time, but at least my CSS works. I may try to futz around with it next weekend to make the design a little cooler - better fonts and colors, if I can find them - but essentially it works (many knocks on wood and offerings to the hypertext gods, whoever they are).

I did realize that I don't much like the template feature in Dreamweaver because of the whole "editable regions" thing - it just gets in the way of ease of use, in my opinion. I think it adds to much bulk to the code, for one thing. It is easy, however, to add a CSS link to new pages and just go. I am feeling more confident about my website skills. I think I will enjoy trying to update the STC student chapter website this summer. Since it doesn't seem like I'm going to be going to class (sigh).

Panicking too

2005-04-20T13:26:00.000-05:00

Seems like I'm not the only one with end-of-the-semester panic attacks. I have a presentation to do Monday that I haven't even written yet, and I have to do usability tests on a portfolio website i've only managed to build a template for so far. I spent about six hours on my portfolio Sunday, during which I messed with my CSS template until it was doing what I wanted, and then changed what I wanted about, oh, 7000 times. I'm still not happy with the colors, but at least the boxes are where I want them to be, and the Site Map is done. Tonight I have to mock up some pages of it for my usability test and write that up for tomorrow, and then this weekend I will finish enough of it to do my hi-fi test in time to present it in class on the 28th. I'm sure to regret volunteering to present it then, but at least this way it will all be over, for good or evil, next Thursday. I do think, though, that my entire site will not be done by the 28th. I think the parent pages will be done but not every child page (the pages with the content) will be ready to go. Hope that is okay. I suppose time will tell. But in order to get all of this accomplished, I'm going to have to take some time off of work, either Friday or Monday. That's the only way I can get it done. On the weekends at home I end up getting distracted by house chores and my husband, so I need one day completely on my own to work in the house with nothing but cats to distract me (who sleep all day and won't bother me, anyway).

Habemus Papam

2005-04-19T17:21:00.000-05:00

He's strict, conservative, and a former member of the Hitler Youth. He has specialized in knocking down liberal theologians and succeeded in bringing down the very architect of the theology of the Second Vatican Council, Hans Kung, by stripping him of his title as Teacher of the Faith (long story. Ask me when I'm not sober some time), among many, many others. And he took the name of a pope whose major contribution to the world was a better version of canon law. In political terms, calling Benedict XVI just to the right of Atilla the Hun should be about right. I wish I was surprised by my church, but I'm just sad instead. Perhaps I've just moved past faith, but I can't believe any longer that God could be confined to this sad, sinful, miserable little bureacratic mess of a church.

Hayhoe's Presentation at Tri-DOC '05

2005-04-15T17:45:00.000-05:00

STC Carolina has not posted docs from their conference yet, but I promised I would talk about Dr. Hayhoe's presentation. If you are interested in a long-term view of a TC career read on, otherwise, have a very nice day and thanks for visiting.

Dr. Hayhoe's presentation was entitled "The Road Not Often Taken: Alternate Career Paths for Senior Technical Communicators." Although I was not a member of the intended audience for his presentation, I still found it very valuable, first because the room was full of senior people and it was interesting hearing their comments, and I thought it was valuable to learn how to get to that stage as well as where he saw the industry going in the future, since I want to be there.

After a brief review of the history of technical communication, Dr. Hayhoe explained what he saw as the state of the industry: TC has been a "cottage industry" since about 1995, made up of a mostly female (70%) workforce with backgrounds in the humanities who work in computer hardware, software and consumer electronics. They work in the US, Europe and Asia writing help docs and websites and increasingly use multimedia for their work. The industry has changed from an army of craftspeople in large organizations to single writers who serve as their own writer/editor/designer and illustrator, with single ownership of projects, little coordination of projects with others, and who often work in their "cottage" at home. Except for the working at home part (and I do some of that but not by choice or because my company thinks I should), welcome to my world. That is me: lone writer, editor, designer, project manager, and chief know-it-all (well, really, know-nothing but find out how and get it done quickly and cheaply).

Dr. Hayhoe defined the knowledge senior technical communicators need as covering four basic areas:

Communication expertise, including an extensive theory and research base and an understanding that few TCs have formal training in the discipline.
Cognate expertise, including some formal knowledge of related fields such as instructional design, cognitive psychology, human factors, usability, typography, and design. A senior TC should understand something of all these fields and have specialized knowledge in one or two of these.
Subject domain expertise, including a mastery of computing and business processes needed to support more sophisticated users of our work as well as the ability to shift to other industries such as healthcare, finance, security, and other service industries (like a law firm).
Management expertise, including estimation and time mangement skills, budgeting, accounting, marketing, leadership, motivation, and interpersonal communication skills.

Lastly Dr. Hayhoe listed three examples of TC career tracks. He drew these from three articles in Technical Communication, which I listed in parens:

Information Development and Design: Job titles would include Production Assistant, Information Developer, Expert Information Developer, Information Designer, and Project Manager. (Carliner, Saul. Emerging skills in technical communication: the information designer's place in a new career path for technical communicators. Technical Communication 48 (2001), 156-175.)
Single Sourcing: Information Designer, Information Architect, Information Technologist, and Information Analyst. (Albers, M.J. Single sourcing and the technical communication career path. Technical Communication 50 (2003), 335-343.)
Knowledge Creation: No job titles here, but job descriptions include helping experts make tacit knowledge explicit, helping design teams reach consensus about product design, and creating knowledge assets, such as websites and documents. (Hughes, M.A. Moving from information transfer to knowledge creation: a new value proposition for technical communicators. Technical Communication 49 (2001),275-285.)

If I had to put my current job into one of those categories, or at least a big chunk of my job, I would say my job at James Scott Farrin is in knowledge creation. I spend 8-12 hours per week creating new content for the website from other sources. Today I updated the legal news pages. The reason we create these news items is to provide information to potential clients and also to pump our site full of keywords related to personal injury lawsuits. If you look, you'll see a lot of repetition of key phrases and words across news items and pages.

I think I have my ME project figured out

2005-04-12T20:31:00.000-05:00

I realized, this weekend during Tri-DOC, that at some level a website is just a website. Websites have been around for almost ten years, and there are things that people have already figured out. I know where the navigation has to go, I know what my limitations are, I know how long everything takes. Once I realized that, things got simpler, and then I remembered that if I do my CSS file correctly, the users will choose what fonts and stuff to display; I'll just stick to a font-family tag and let the browsers do the work. All I really have to do is make some boxes and throw my stuff in them. Voila: website.

The boxy approach is, well, boxy, but some designer types have figured out beautiful ways to get beyond boxes. However I am not and probably never will be a visual artist. I just don't work that way. I work with words. That is my talent, that's where my flow is; not to get ahead of class but I've already read and must recommend Csikszentmihalyi (Flow is a great book; all must read and not worry if they can't pronounce the name). Surely a wise man somewhere has said: know thy limitations. I know that someone also once said that a writer should find out what about his writing garners the most criticism, and then follow that puppy all the way home, because that is what makes YOU you. (I have to go find that quote now, but it's in one of my little books with quotes in them and I'll have to go through all five or six to find it and I'm just not in the mood now. But I'll find it). It will be the thing that drives some people nuts about you, makes others jealous of you, and inspires admiration of you. That's you. If you have an encyclopedic memory of baseball statistics (like my husband), then, baby, that's YOU. I don't know what you can do with that (I personally think my husband should work in baseball stats but he insists that's not a real career, just a part-time job. So what? I say. Go do it part-time and be happy. One day I hope he will. But I digress), but that's it. It's the one thing that I know for sure about myself: I write. Not always grammatically, but there you go.

I know I have some visual talent in that I have an intuitive sense of what colors and patterns work together. My mother has this gift in spades; she used to own a frame shop and art gallery and she could always find the right color mat, frame, or treatment for a piece of art, whether it be a cute little cross-stitch or a modern oil. What I have of that is something that tells me "Nah, that's not right," or "That is not aligned correctly." But make something up from scratch? No way. So I just steal, like any marketing person does. I'm sure that most of the portfolios for class are going to look pretty similar in some fashion. That's okay; no one said we have to re-invent the wheel.

John's comments to my last posting on this subject did cause me more reflection, and I think his point is valid that the technical part of technical writing, in the new sense of someone who can communicate using technological tools like the internet, html, Flash, XML, UML, etc., and etc., may be over-emphasized in some fashion. I don't think it's a flaw in the program at NCSU though. I looked back through the topics at Tri-DOC, and the profession continues to be dominated by tools. Writing becomes another tool in our aresenal, but knowing and manipulating technology is very important. I think Jason doesn't necessarily expect us to have a website that can do tricks, but it's absolutely valid that we have to be exposed to trying to build one by using sound design principles, because over my short (5 years now) career in communications, I've been involved in building at least four different websites, and it only gets more complicated and more involving and more exhausting, and also more and more important for companies of every size because that is where people are communicating with them and with each other. We are learning a process that can be helpful in many ways, and has already made me think differently about the website I just built and am continuing to modify. And modify. And modify.

But it is also true that gifts differ. The programmers of the engine that built my website, and the designer, would rather be boiled in oil than write all of the content for that site as I have done. They don't even want to think about it. Just like I would rather be boiled than crank out code for hours. I think it's the very rare bird that can do both. That bird might not even have been identified yet. I am experiencing a great deal of dissatisfaction right now. In the past few weeks something has changed at work that makes me not want to come in any more, and that's a very bad sign. I feel an internal resistance to a lot of what I have to do, and I don't know where it's coming from. I actually didn't finish my problem sets for BUS 543, on purpose, knowing I'm going to automatically get a B on that assignment, because it honestly was not worth my time and effort just to secure an A, because doing that assignment was not going to increase my knowledge of SQL one iota, and so I didn't bother with it. This is a totally new attitude for me. I don't feel the same way about projects in 519 (no worries Jason), but this new attitude is making me look very carefully at what I am doing in this program. During Tri-DOC Heather and I talked about summer classes and she told me she is taking an "easy elective." I thought about doing something similar, but then I realized I'd just feel the same way about it. Why bother? My time should be quality time. I'm not wasting anymore of my life doing stupid shit and feeling miserably stuck in someone else's enforced limbo; I'm just not. So I need to figure out if I am wasting my time here, if I'm not wasting it and the MS is going to get me somewhere I want to go, or if I want to invest the next serious chunk of my life into getting a PhD. If I am wasting it, I need to do something else. If the investment is worthwhile, I need to accept the time it's going to take to do it, either the MS or going further. I know there are no guarantees, but if I can't get to some peace about it, I'm abandoning the whole idea and looking for something else. Life is too short to have this many reservations about the way one is spending it.

Tri-DOC '05

2005-04-11T11:56:00.000-05:00

On Friday and Saturday I volunteered at STC Carolina's Tri-DOC 2005 conference at the North Raleigh Hilton. There were about 250 attendees, mostly from the area although I met a few people from VA and TN (all the way from Nashville). I met most of the vendors and presenters and was able to attend about half of the sessions. I served as a room monitor, registration desk attendant, and general directional staff (turn left, bathrooms this way!). I talked with John Kohlfrom SAS a bit, who helped me with my ENG 512 project on glossaries that is going to be published in the Journal of Technical Communication in the fall (hopefully) and I met Dr. Hayhoe from ECU, the editor of the journal. I enjoyed his session the most because it was about alternative careers for technical communicators. The session was filled with veterans of the industry so there was a lot to learn. He covered three articles about new careers in TC that I will post here in the next few days when I get a breather. Right after the conference on Saturday I went straight to a Bulls baseball game but we bugged out soon after the 7th because my back was killing me. My poor husband. He put up with a lot from me this weekend. All weekend I was busy with school-related stuff.

Mostly I hung out with Heather Brautman, who was the Volunteer Cordinator and queen of the volunteers. She introduced me to just about everyone and I met some really great and interesting people. I met all the officers from STC Carolina and found out all kinds of information. I never knew that students in ETC have mailboxes somewhere in Tompkins. Did you? I also got roped (but willingly) by Sarah Egan Warren into considering being an officer of the NCSU STC chapter next year; I said I'd help out with the web. I came away from the conference with a cool book and lots of goodies. All in all I really enjoyed the conference, the sessions and the folks. I'm sure I'll have more to say about it soon but now it's work time and I"m smack in the middle of Monday morning in spreadsheet hell. Better get back to it.

Not feeling visual right now.

2005-04-07T17:14:00.000-05:00

I haven't done much for my visual plan. In fact, I think I've stepped backwards. Once I started thinking about dreamweaver and getting in it, I realized my wireframe is too complicated (Jason said it might be). I futzed around last night for a few hours trying to come up with a template and succeeded in getting a three-column layout together, but I don't have a single visual image in my head other than the icons I want - I don't know what color, fonts, words I want to use on this site at all. I feel like I hit a wall.

Part of that was something I've been coming up against for the past month and not dealing with, which is a nagging suspicion that I am in the wrong program. I get very resistant when it comes to the design or technical end of websites - I lose patience, my brain seems to freeze. Only when I'm working in words do things flow back together. I've enjoyed my classes a lot, but the actual web development work I've done on my own gives me this gnawing feeling, like "danger; go no farther." I can even hear Tom Waits going "buoy, buoy" in my head (it's a Fisher King thing. I'm sure that's about the vaguest reference I've yet blogged). Something inside tells me this is not what I really want. The problem is, what do I really want?

What has got me pretty worked up and interested in work in rhetoric. Great, I can hear my mother saying; another path that leads nowhere. What am I going to do with that? Teach? I don't even know if I can do that. Going on to the PhD program interests me, but that seems to mean committing to teaching. I will have to speak with Jason about this I guess, and probably Dr. Katz. I'm thinking of hooking up with a life coach and really making sure I know what I want before I go farther. Only the rhetoric classes spun me up for next fall, and one of those I can't get into. Which will cause me to go into another rant, and I don't have time - I need to eat dinner before I go to class. Sigh.

I realize there was some basketball game last night,

2005-04-05T17:02:00.000-05:00

but I've moved past it. I only watched the last sixty seconds anyway. Poor Illinois; I thought they deserved it, but Carolina was just unstoppable this year. I hope some of those boys go off and play nice with the NBA so we don't have to look at their mugs next year. The Wolfpack ended up ranked 22 in the Coaches' Post-Season Poll, which should give all Wolfpackers a sense of satisfaction. It was a tough year, but we survived it. I'm not really jealous of Carolina, and I am sincerely happy for Carolina fans; I just wish NC State fans would get over feeling like second-best and just enjoy the team they have, because they are pretty darned good, if you ask me, and we'll get a chance to beat Carolina by the end of the month, but in baseball. Life goes on . . .

Warning: Rant Ahead, please debark now if you don't want to hear me bitching.

Last night our BUS 543 class was set aside to work on problems in class. I could have sworn that Dr. Payton said she would be in class during the period to answer questions, and at least 10 other people thought so too, but she did not show up. We went searching for her, but she was nowhere to be found, so I had to call my husband, who was on his way home after dropping me off, to turn around and come pick me back up. On top of that, one of our problems involves a chapter from an Oracle tutorial where we are basically supposed to repeat the examples listed in the chapter and print our SQL query results to prove we made the things work. Which is the most ridiculous assignment I've had to do for her class yet. What exactly is the point of having us re-do the examples in the chapter that are already done for us in the text? How does it prove I've learned anything? I'm so mad about it I can't sit still long enough to do the damned thing. It's just so dumb. Please, TCers, stay away from that class; it will drive you mad.

Le Rant finit, merci.

The Tale of Shadow

2005-04-02T07:19:00.000-05:00

Shadow is my husband's cat. She is a four-year old gray tabby who is still in the kitten stage - always curious, always getting into fixes and messes, and very feisty. When Richard and I moved in together two years ago, we made a big mistake with her adjustment to my three cats. They were too much for her, so we moved her into a separate room, but she never came out. She has basically lived in the front bedroom of our apartment all that time. We have tried many different strategies to get her out of the room into the rest of the house with the family, but my two more dominant female cats are always watching, giving her hell when she attempts to traverse the boundaries of her territory.

When I began school last semester, I started spending more time in "Shadow's room" with my computer doing schoolwork, and Shadow became a bit more aggressive after being able to sit on my lap or roam the desk while I was working, and she became more affectionate toward me. But it wasn't until this year, when we had to make major dietary changes in her life, that she has finally stepped out into the rest of the apartment there for any length of time without being forced to do so. My male cat, Bishop, is a brown tabby, at least 13 years old, and overweight (he was pushing 20 lbs). The vet put him on a diet to help relieve arthritis in his back legs, and we had to put all of the cats on a feeding schedule because Bishop has this "prisoner" feeding mentality that makes him hover over the food bowls and eat pretty much all day. He was a stray and, I believe, neglected if not abused before he came to live with me. If there isn't food in the bowl, he gets very stressed out, and he gained more weight when we moved in with Shadow because of the two food bowls we had to leave out. I think, in fear of food never returning, he just eats all of the food in front of him, because he would not eat for days before. I don't have any proof of that, other than his behavior.

To kick off Bishop's diet the vet suggested regular feeding times with controlled portions for Bishop, which meant everybody had to have a feeding time or else Bishop would just "snack" when we weren't looking. This caused me not a little anxiety for my littlest cat, Newt, who has never been more than 8 and 1/4 lbs since she obtained full growth. Newt was the other runt in her litter; the smaller, sicker runt (I think he was deaf or blind, I don't remember) died but Newt made it, other than ear mites and a respiratory infection, she was just small. When she was a kitten she was almost half as small as her sister Ripley, whom I also adopted. Chicago will always have a special place in my heart, among many other reasons, because it is where I found my sweet cats. But I digress. I have been terrified Newt will starve. She eats very little during her feeding times. I supplement them by giving her snacks which she hungrily devours, but she seems to have adjusted alright, other than being cranky which she always is, making it hard to tell if the food schedule is making any difference in her mood. Although she is the smallest, she has been the dominant cat in my household most of her life. There have always been runs where Bishop or Ripley will attempt to gain control, but Newt always emerges victorious.

But to get back to the story - this feeding schedule has made Shadow more aggressive, and she started coming out of her room at mealtimes to get her food. We are sometimes able to get her to eat her food in the hallway or the living room, but usually when Newt starts hissing, she hoofs it back to home base. But for the past several nights she has been venturing into the bedroom, the living room, and the hall. You have no idea what a major event that is in our house. She's like the prodigal cat!

When we get a new house, we hope we can start over with Shadow by introducing her into the house first this time instead of last. But I'm worried she'll just find another home base and the cycle will continue. It doesn't sound like much, but the two locations are a pain - double litter boxes and double food. But it may be moot if she can make it into normalcy on her own. Here's hoping . . .

Now for the hard part

2005-03-31T18:53:00.000-05:00

With tournament excitement and schoolwork kicking my butt, I forgot to mention that the new version of farrin.com went live last Thursday. The Chinese calligraphy picture is still just a placeholder; it's changing in a few days, but pictures hasn't been a big priority for me this week. Getting the SEO started has been, so we can get ranked and make up for the time we lost we our last vendor, and I've had some very pressing projects in the meantime, most notably trying to fix some problems we are having with our television advertising not airing, direct mail kicking into high gear, and starting a new client referral program at the Firm, among my other usually hectic and pressing duties. Oh, and I've got to get back to creating more website content. I just got time to take a breath and spend Easter Saturday at Chez Tackabery in Southern Pines before I got right back in to a hectic, hectic, and did I say hectic?! week.

The ball game was great last night, but we left early because I was exhausted and also getting cold. There were a group of college students (imagine that, at a college baseball game; what other kind of students would they be, bright eyes? Sheesh, I'm tired) sitting behind and to the left of us, and I was getting a kick out of them. The thrust of their conversation was basically about -- well -- nothing in particular. They were laughing a lot, picking on each other mercilessly, and it reminded me of the times I had in college with my best friends Rob and Penny and the rest of the crowd I hung around with. I don't remember most of the brunt of the time we spent together; I mostly remember laughing all the time, probably about similarly mundane bullshit. There was also much excitement among the females when some members of the basketball team showed up; when my husband went up to get water he called me up to report an Engin Atsur sighting, and I realized why the girls got so giggly, 'cause he is pretty cute. BMOC. I guess I realize now why other people's parents always told me, during my college days, that I was in the best years of my life. They were pretty good. But, life is pretty good right now too. I have a wonderful relationship, a good job, ample electronic equipment, a broadband connection, and four cats who occasionally shower me with affection when it suits them. And I've got the Wolfpack. What more can a girl ask for?

It all washes out in the end

2005-03-30T14:13:00.000-05:00

I was gratified on Monday night to hear the tail end of Coach Sendek's radio show, which was full of callers with positive comments about the squad and the Coach. It seems that after all was said and done, this year's Wolfpack was very much like last year's Wolfpack except for their free throw percentages. The return to Herb-bashing and screaming about how we never finish, especially coming so soon after the loss last week (I think Ned Barnett gave them less than 24 hours grace before he put the match to the fire), was disheartening. Many bloggers and message board posters (heretofore referred to as fungi) seem to be dividing the fan camps squarely into the "defend Herb unto the death" camp and the "Herb must go, period," camp, which I think is too simplistic a read of the situation. Of course we all want to win championships, but this is amateur athletics, and we should all just get a grip. What the Coach and the team need is our support. If you want to make the entire program about banners and trophies, go watch the NBA. I guarantee you will not have as satisfying experience watching people who play for a living. It's just not the same thing.

My husband Richard is an avid baseball fan, although strangely enough he doesn't follow the college game as carefully as he follows the majors. Probably this is just because growing up you didn't hear much about ACC baseball (I never did). But last year we finally went to a game against Carolina, and I enjoyed that game far more than I did the Bulls games we go to. Don't get me wrong, I love going to the games at DBAP with him, but there is far more passion and excitement at a college baseball game than at the Bulls park. For one, the fans are all engaged in the game, and when I say engaged, I mean, actively participating. It's like Showtime at the Apollo - guys are yelling at the refs and encouraging the team with every single pitch; I'm surprised the Coach gets a word in edgewise. It is constant chatter, and that's just in the bleachers. People stand up, yell, scream, jump and holler, clap, and get hoarse, just like they do at the football and basketball games, but it's a much smaller crowd. It feels different, though, and it has to be because the game is about the game, not about paychecks.

I'm not naive, I don't expect our players not to think about professional careers and no Coach can not deal with it; it's just a fact that most of these players are not going to have their names on professional jerseys. For most of them, this is as good as it gets, and I believe it's much better than the higher-priced alternatives. Whether or not this makes my blog a baseball blog now, I don't know, but we are going to our first baseball game tonight; there's a rumor that Andrew Brackman might relieve. I did want to mention that my favorite hustler, Engin Atsur, led the team with 287 deflections and 57 steals this year, before I shut up about basketball; and now I'm done.

Just can't do it.

2005-03-27T08:59:00.000-05:00

Root for Carolina, that is. Richard informed me this morning that the only way we'll win my firm's bracket is if Carolina takes a dive. This leaves me in the position of rooting for the skunks, er, badgers, that beat us on Friday. As this is an untenable moral position, I have elected not to watch the stinking game and let the chips fall where they may. Technically I should go with the lesser of two evils, but I am unable to maintain enough objectivist perspective to realize which team that is.

Okay, enough deontological hat-dancing. Time for baseball. Next Saturday is Richard's Stat-O-Matic draft, during which I'll be doing homework, and later we are going to the Virginia Tech game that night, and then the next weekend we have our first game in our Durham Bulls mini-pack. After school is out for the semester, we are going up to DC to see the Nationals play the Cubs and catch up on some of the new monuments, and perhaps go to the zoo. I am looking forward to our second-ever vacation as married folk (our first being our honeymoon, which was in Las Vegas) and having the summer off to pursue really learning Flash and perhaps php. I always have bigger project goals than I can actually accomplish, but we'll see. The big project of the summer will be finding a house. We hope to be in our first home by Christmas of this year. It will be the first home that I have ever lived in that will actually belong to me (once the mortgage is paid off, that is). For my life entire, I have lived in apartments, rented trailers, or rented houses, and never, ever, felt safe; the threat of being thrown out because we couldn't pay was always imminent and real. One of my family's first abodes was the projects in Staten Island. I am really looking forward to making that a permanent part of my past and making a home that no one can take away from me.

Post Madness

2005-03-25T21:47:00.000-05:00

The run is over, and though it stings a bit, I'm still proud as hell. Engin was the Chevrolet player of the game (beat me by two points, again) and for most of the second half, was the only reason we stayed in it. Duke is out too, so at least my boss and I will both be miserable on Monday. Go Heels, I guess.

Pre-Madness Post, with no information architecture to speak of.

2005-03-25T17:51:00.000-05:00

Tip time: 7:27 p.m. tonight. Hours spent at work today in a CRM Roundtable Session: 15? 30? The clock said 9:30 to 3:30, but I think it was the longest meeting of my life! Sitting in a conference room racking my brain for referral marketing ideas, drinking too much Diet Coke, and fidgeting. Wondering how the guys were shooting in practice, and whether Tony will play. At every break, we talked about basketball. All anybody talked about at work was the games tonight, and everyone was being nice to everyone else - all the Tarheel fans wished State luck, the Duke fans were being gracius to the Carolina fans, and vice-versa; it was an ACC love fest in there today, but it will all be back to normal after Sunday, which is Easter, as if anyone cared . (I work for a personal injury law firm, we're a bunch of liberal agnostics in there, okay? Well, not all of us, but enough to count.)

Jim was calling the dry-erase markers "Duke blue" and "Wolfpack red." Is this obsessive? Nah. . . Personally I can't root for Duke or Carolina unless we are officially out of the dance altogether, but it's such a good thing for all three of the Triangle schools' recruiting efforts to have gotten this far. And I think Herb has a job next year, don't you?

My boy got some love, from an out-ot-town paper. Rob Daniels called him "the total package that doesn't fit in a package;" I just love that. I have a good feeling about Engin tonight; the black socks are going to hold up, and he's going to have a good night tonight: 14 points, 4 steals. The last time I predicted Engin's score, he beat me by two points (Clemson), which in my mind qualifies as a winning record.

Dickie V is ranting about Duke on ESPN right now, which is the game the other 90% of America will be watching instead of ours. He just got to us -- oh no, the kiss of death! He's predicting a North Carolina - North Carolina State matchup on Sunday. Jesus please us. It's good to be loved, but bad karma if you're a Wolfpack fan. We are supposed to be hungry and ignored. It's okay though. All is well. Just over an hour left. Can't come fast enough.

FYI TCers,

2005-03-24T09:55:00.000-05:00

Monster.com has been advertising more technical writing positions as of late. Today I saw one from CTG and one from Modis.

Content Inventory. Not again!

2005-03-23T10:21:00.000-05:00

When Jason said in class last night that we were going to be starting on a content inventory for our ME project, my heart just slid to my stomach. I have been doing content inventory for my website at work for weeks, and the last thing I want to do, even though I have so much more to do it's unbelievable, is look at more content and figure out what to put on my website. Can someone else do this for me? I'm so sick of modules (little granular bits of content. My life is now divided into modules. Right now I'm in the rant module, if you haven't noticed), I could puke. After class last night I worked on checking and re-checking the new website (hopefully rolling out today) until 1 in the morning. I'm sick of websites right now, and I can't get away from them. In the words of the great Charlie Brown: I can't stand it!

Which is why I'm so thrilled that there are Julius Hodge cartoons to read for much-needed mental break times. It doesn't take much to amuse me right now. I have always been amazed at the fact that when Julius Hodge turns sideways, he disappears. Every time I watch him play, I am amazed that he can stand up on those legs at all.

Ladies and gentlemen: Julius Hodge

2005-03-22T07:12:00.000-05:00

The mouth is back.

Overwhelming D is what gets you to the 16

2005-03-21T10:23:00.000-05:00

There is one picture, after all the shots of well-deserved jubilation and joy, that exemplifies Sunday's Wolfpack victory over UConn. It's here, halfway down the page: Engin, Jordan, and Gavin just swarming over, around and through Hilton Armstrong to go after a loose ball. After everything this team has been through, to not give up for one second, to fight this hard, to just not let it go this time, is why they won. I was really impressed with Julius Hodge during the post-game press conference as he gave much respect to his opponents, controlling what had to be incredible surges of emotion to answers questions calmly and purposefully while continuing to deflect and share praise with his teammates. The fungi had to be struck dumb by the stat that Herb Sendek has now tied Everett Case and Jim Valvano for most post-season wins by the Wolfpack. What a great reflection on him to see his men act with such poise, charm and control. This is why ACC basketball is one of the best things there is.

It was not exactly ballroom dancing . . .

2005-03-19T09:59:00.000-05:00

but they got the W which is what counts. Engin seemed to have tough game in the first half. He's been so consistent all year and really carrying a lot of the d on his back, so it was more than great to finally see someone else step up and give him some help. Cameron Bennerman, the Sixth Man, back again, just when we need him the most. It's a good time to be a Wolfpack fan. It's been such a very horrendous year with so much heartbreak. It still might not end well, but I know they are giving it everything they have.

Meanwhile I'm just swamped with work. I've got to finish populating our corporate website this week so it can go live, I've got the information plan to write for 519 that I haven't even looked at since class, and I've got six problems on my mid-term for BUS 543. (I have a lot of ranting to do about that class, but no time now, so you are spared). Richard and I are going up to Virginia Beach today to pick up a couch and a loveseat my sister is donating to us, but we can't afford more than a day's rental of a van, so we have to rush up there, and rush back here before noon to turn the truck in and catch our next ballgame, meaning I don't get much quality time with my nephews, plus Richard is still sick, plus I have to go in to work to do my bi-weekly TV report, then write that info plan and finish the mid-term. Oh, and I've got to finish the reading for 519 plus read two l-o-n-g chapters for 543 on data design and data warehousing. I'm tired just writing about it. Not a lot of time to get that all done before tomorrow night.

I am the cut-and-paste Master, er, Mistress.

2005-03-15T22:47:00.000-05:00

Hello, class. The dazed look you see on my face is from hours of cutting and pasting my old website into my new website. Which, although it is taking a long time, is actually quite exciting. What? you ask? Cutting and pasting a thrill? Well, yes, when you are using a very cool content management system that is flexible enough to do darn near anything. The guys at CoalMarch have been incredibly responsive to all my requests and bug reports. I mean, incredibly responsive, such as, fixing a problem before I even got a copy of my own bug report via email. Now that's impressive. John would love the level of their customer service.

The engine they have developed is called CoalEngine, and you should go to their website and check it out, then go hire them, because they need office furniture and new flooring; their carpet is pretty hideous. But, office decor aside, the tool they have built is really powerful and is going to do great things for our website. It's hard to convince my boss of that yet. He doesn't get thrilled by my telling him I created ten pages in ten minutes. He wants cases, and he's going to have to wait many months for them, so on a day-to-day basis, it's hard to transfer my enthusiasm for this project to him. But I plug on, praying this sucker works. I think it will though.

But that's not what I came to talk about, blogging when I should be catching up on all the reading I didn't do for class this weekend because I was cutting and pasting and, um, watching basketball. Well, you knew I was, didn't you? Sheesh. You can't expect me to ignore the ACC tournament, can you? But I digress. The thing I'm excited about is the mark-up system I get to use, an open-source tool called Markdown. It is incredibly great. No more bloody closed tags and ampersands; yeah. Once I started using it (yesterday) I got really enthused because it's so fast. It's just as fast as typing. Really. I may just have to send the guy some money and get a t-shirt. Does this make me an open-source geek now? All hail the asterisk.

Okay, I'm tired. That probably didn't make sense, did it? Time for bed - say goodnight, Michelle.

Goodnight, Michelle.

No real loss

2005-03-13T08:04:00.000-05:00

Granted, we aren't going to the finals in the tourney, but the fact is that JJ Redick had to have his big game in order to beat us, because it was our game for a long time yesterday, and I could not be prouder of our guys. I knew we probably weren't going to win if Redick got hot. Our guys played like warriors out there. Engin ran his ass off, and the guys just gave some furious d. They deserve a little rest. I hope they dance, but even if they don't I am still proud to be a Wolfpack fan. The excitement is over. It's time to get back to school work and work work - what a bummer.

18:47 hrs Update: definitely not a loss, because we have our dancing shoes on now.

Gentlemen Callers

2005-03-12T13:54:00.000-05:00

There was smack on the DC court last night, so much so that a ref told Julius to shut up already. He couldn't, though, because he was so proud of his teammates, especially the stepping-up and laying-it-down freshmen and the Sixth Man Returning, Cameron Bennerman. Everything looked effortless, even with Engin having something of a cold game offensively (but not on D! No f'ing way), and what can you say about Ilian's pass that went in the hoop? Guardian angels must be in abundance for the Pack this week, and they've been a joy to behold, no matter what happens today. They just played beautiful basketball, and two most beautiful things about our game was that there was no ugliness, animosity, pushing, shoving, or anything else towards Wake, and the gentlemanly gushing Julius did post-game. He gave props to everybody except the ball boys and said some incredibly warm, loving things about Coach Sendek that I hope made a lot of the fungi feel bad. Real bad, as in, give up their tickets next year bad, so I can a better seat for '06. I really appreciated that Tony Haynes gave the Player of the Game award to the whole team.

Today I have to say that I see it as the Atsur-Redick rematch, and the ACC voters who forgot to put #14 on the All-Defensive Team are going to get a talking to when they remember that Engin is the guy who manuevered poetic Jonathan into his lowest scoring game of the year (1 out of 5). I can barely sit still waiting for 3:30 to get here. You gotta love this game.

Survive and Advance

2005-03-11T15:42:00.000-05:00

. . . that's what it's all about this Friday. Ilian was declared a hero in Sportsline's Build-a-Bracket column today. Which is really just a challenge, to knock down six of those heart-stopping threes today, right? I hope the guys feel ready to lay down the smack, because I know every Wolfpack fan around here is ready. Julius is even back to his old wise-cracking self.

Life is good. Atsur 17 pts, Evtimov 18

2005-03-10T18:45:00.000-05:00

Names were taken, and Engin (zero turnovers, 9 rebounds) and Ilian (five threes! Mama!) had great games against FSU today, even though I didn't see it. I kept up with it via Gametracker, which (annoyingly) had some kind of weird delay at the start of each half where it didn't scroll any play-by-play until three minutes or so had passed. I was quite upset that I missed Ilian hit those threes in the first half, especially since I just heard he tied a school record for most 3-pointers in an ACC tournament game, but tomorrow's payback game starts at 7 so I won't miss the rest of it, no matter what happens. That's cool. I'm not going to worry about the bit of flakiness we may have displayed in the second or that Tony pulled a groin muscle (ouch, it's the year of the groin for the Wolfpack now). I just hope the team remembers that revenge is best served cold. Ice cold, from about twenty-two feet out or so. The best part will be watching Chris Paul squirm from the bench, I think. That's just a terrible attitude, isn't it? I should feel bad about it, but I'm just waiting for the smackdown. It's gonna feel good to see the guys play the way they played in last year's tournaments. I'm remembering Ilian's performance against Vandy, which was lethal. We almost got them last year. Anything can happen, baby.

Kicking ass and taking names is now our mission . . .

2005-03-09T22:04:00.000-05:00

beginning with Von Wafer, who may be a perfectly nice person for all I know, but needs to go down on the tournament court tomorrow because he scored all over us last time. We only gave up 9 turnovers in that game, and they only gave up 10; we shot a great game but they beat us. It is not going to be easy to walk over FSU to get to Wake, especially if we can't hit our free throws, but it can happen. Engin can tie Wafer up, put him in his defensive pocket and then go kick some Demon Deacon butt on the next day. That's all they need to dance, and they are going to do it. Unfortunately, I can't watch it. I will be getting introduced to our new website engine tomorrow and we have a go-live date of next Tuesday, which means I need to spend every spare minute working on the new site. Well, one eye full of every minute. I can keep the other eye on the Gametracker, can't I? It's hell to be hired out, without a prayer of coming down with the blue flu, during the ACC Tournament.

More six degrees of blogs

2005-03-09T12:38:00.000-05:00

Found an article on a new tool for discovering blogs today; via Search Views's link to an article on Search Engine Watch. The tool is called Blogstreet and uses linking patterns between blogs to find blogs you might be interested in, from the ones that already interest you. I tried it out and it's pretty interesting. I currently use Bloglines to keep up with my blogs, but there are some annoyances. Some RSS feeds pull redundant data and I end up looking at something I've already read. For instance, John Martin's feed occasionally will pull the last four or five feeds when it sends me the latest one. Don't know why that is, but in general, Bloglines is a very convenient (and free) tool for organizing and keeping up with the blogs I read. I like being able to find new blogs through the keyword search tool, but I think I'll bookmark Blogstreet when I want something fresh. It's definitely an interesting way to find things I probably wouldn't otherwise.

Wake 55, NCSU 53, Sportsmanlike Behavior 0

2005-03-07T10:14:00.000-05:00

Chris Paul is a punk from East Winston. There is no other explanation for the flagrant foul he committed against Julius Hodge, and if he doesn't get suspended for it there is no justice. I think the five to eight minutes Julius Hodge spent curled into a ball clutching his groin and screaming in pain had to be the worst minutes of his life and represented everything that can go wrong in college basketball. It's a game and nobody needs to get that personal. Paul grabbed him by one arm so he could hold him still for his follow-up punch! 19,000 people called foul and begged for him to "get up, just get up, Jules" while he was unable to stand up and might have been facing the end of his career in that arena, on his back, if he wasn't able to come back in.

I feel so bad for our guys, who gave us the most exciting, most ballsy (no pun intended), gutsiest, hardest-fought game I have ever seen in the RBC Center. (Granted, I haven't seen that many, but it was special). Richard said the noise and the intensity during the second half was exactly the way Reynolds used to be for big games. No question it was the biggest game of our season. The only thing for it is for us to stomp on FSU Thursday afternoon so we can stand face-to-face with Wake and bitch-slap them in the tournament (Chris Paul better hope Ilian Evtimov isn't friendly with any Bulgarian mobsters with nothing to do. Or any wanna-be gangsters from East Winston who Paul owes money to). Engin looked absolutely defeated after it was over, which was the other most shocking thing for me of the whole night. When we got home and watched the replays, it was just obvious that we got robbed by three guys in black and white. During the second half I remarked that the refs were treating Wake like they were in kindergarten learning tee-ball. You know, when the coach just keeps the kid in until he gets a hit? What other explanation could there be for continuously calling fouls on our guys and giving Wake another shot at the basket? Richard said their end of the court was tee-ball, our end of the court was rollerball. Why does the #4 team in the country get treated differently, or is that a rhetorical question?

Post Update 1609 hrs: Paul was suspended for one game by WFU and will not play in the first Wake game of the ACC tournament which, the universe and karma all falling correctly into place, will be against our guys.

All hail the mighty Atsur

2005-03-04T11:23:00.000-05:00

First of all, somebody has to rave about this guy since nobody who writes in Raleigh, NC, ever manages to. Whenever I see that Duke's JJ Redick has trounced another line of wimpy defenders in the ACC, like he did last night to Florida State, I remember that Engin held JJ to only 8 points in the RBC Center. I was watching highlights yesterday from my sick bed (I'm pretty sure my cold has turned into a sinus infection and I feel like a dying dog. Lovely metaphor, ain't it?) and it's all dunks, dunks, dunks. This country is in love with the smackdown, smackover, in-your-face basket jam, and it's just too bad, because it's such a rare thing. Real basketball is grungy and hard-fought. I guess major defensive stops aren't as sexy, but they sure do make a big difference when you are up against the shooter no one else can shut down. Keep it up, Engin, keep it up. You know Wake is beatable.

With the way the freshmen are coming along on the inside (go Ced and Andrew), it's going to be a great year of basketball next year, if I can stand the wait; kickouts to Engin for the three, all season long. One more home game left and it's all over for this one though. I'm already mourning it! Now that's just -- obsessive.

p.s. I got a good grade on my paper, not to brag but I did promise I'd post my results. I am not re-writing it right now but I am considering doing the work this summer. It might make a good journal article. There is a book out about the rhetoric of classified advertising I found during my research, and it might be interesting to compare online ads to newspaper ads.

Waiting with baited breath for my paper. Oh, and there's that game tonight . . .

2005-03-02T12:58:00.000-05:00

I haven't gotten the first minute to work on my mapping notes, so I'm planning on doing that tonight before the basketball game. Which, you probably realize, we must win. Must. Win. We must. Have you gotten the point? I have nothing but confidence in my team. Nothing but. Engin was quoted in the press today as saying "we have only one purpose now and thats the Virginia game. " It has to be damned-near impossible not to think about Wake, the tournament, and the dance at the same time, but if anyone is managing not to think about that, I know it is my favorite player. I've said it before and it bears repeating: everybody play like Engin and we'll be just fine.

In other news, our 519 genre papers are apparently not up to par. I know my paper was among the five graded first because I turned it in early. I thought I did okay; well, not great exactly, but that was mainly my disappointment because I felt that I could have really delved into the topic more if I had the time. I had two other papers to write that weekend plus two three-hour SQL tutorials to work through and it was truly the best I could do in the time I had to do it. I didn't want to ask for an extension after missing two classes from being sick; I'm not going to feel guilty about not asking for one unless I get my paper back and Jason says (and I'm sure it will be more polite), "WTF were you thinking, kid? "

I did feel that I proved online recruitment sites are a genre and I thought I detailed the discourse community, such as it is, and for the rest of the paper I talked about how the sites help users complete their tasks and meet their goals. I thought I did okay, but could have done much more with the topic, and I said so in my paper. I could have compared jobs ads to newspaper ads (no time), could have talked about the difference between paper and online resumes (no time), could have delved into classified ads as a genre (ditto), but . . . who knows? Perhaps I just did not do a good job. It has been known to happen. Richard always tells me I worry too much about my academic performance. I always expect that unless I'm completely asleep, I should get an A or an A- on everything. My opinion is, I'm making the investment in my education and I damned well better get every penny out of it. If I'm not learning anything, I won't get an A. If I do get an A, that proves I've learned something that I can take away and get a new career with. That may be simplistic, or arrogant, but there it is. Anything less than that is just not acceptable to me.

Caution: Rant follows.

I get very frustrated in classes sometimes, especially when professors change the schedules around to accommodate students. Dr. Payton completely screwed with the schedule because people in our BUS 543 class did not get work done on time, and I mean she really hurt me. I had planned out my work schedule for the semester to account for all the things I need to do in both classes, and then she completely changed things. I 've got all my major projects for both classes due at pretty much the same time. It's very, very painful. We were going to have spring break to work on our take-home mid-term, but because of pushing things back, we are getting our mid-term the week after spring break. Originally we were going to have three days to work on it and turn it in, which would have meant I'd have gotten the mid-term at 9 pm on Monday and have to turn it in at 3 pm that Thursday. In between, I would have two 519 classes and only one night off, which would have given me exactly one night to work on it. So I had to ask for an extension on that, just because the pushback was now hurting me. Just so the slackers in that class could have an extra week to read the ASSIGNED BOOK (!!! Jesus!!! am I the only person who gets annoyed when people don't bother to keep up?), the time allotted for the mid-term, a much harder project, got crunched in half. Dr. Payton agreed to push the due-date back to the following Monday, but that means I've got to work on that along with the work I need to do for 519 that weekend, and right now have no major assignments to do during spring break, the one chance I would have had to get caught up and do that mid-term. Now I've got compression. It's just so DUMB. I'm sure professors agonize over getting these schedules right. Why don't they just refuse to compromise? If students can't keep up they should just drop the class or drop out of grad school. No one said it would be easy to be a graduate student.

Breathe, Michelle. 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Okay. I'm done ranting now. And I'm not criticizing Jason (really). I didn't like Swales much, but I did read it. I guess it's from being a theology student, but I don't really feel like the reading for 519 was too much. When I was in upper level theology I had some classes where we were reading a book like Swales every other week. I remember my Honors Western Civilization class, and we had to read about 400 pages a week, of thick, impossibly-hard-to-understand theoloy and philosophy. If you disagree, try diving into Kierkegaard, or Karl Barth, or Hans Kung. Knock yourself out, baby, because the translation from the German will kill you dead otherwise. Maybe it's a Catholic school thing, or maybe I'm just . . . insane. But I read what's assigned for the same reason I always work for the A.

Grounding Exercise Follow-Up

2005-02-28T21:29:00.000-05:00

Jason asked me some more questions in his comments on my grounding exercise that I'd like to address. First, his comments:

Very thoughtful grounding exercise, Michelle. I think your comments about wanting to push the Herring et. al article to be more rhetorical in its analysis are spot on. There is just something about doing a strictly quantitative analysis of a communicative phenomenon that leaves me feeling a little short-changed.

Did you find that there were any rhetorical implications of the Herring et.al piece? Rhetorical implications that were not addressed in the Miller and Shepherd piece?

I like your discussion of voice. I think that the voice of a blog is an understated point of analysis that we ought to consider. When I think about the blogs that I read on a regular basis, I find that I don’t always know anything about the people I am reading. I gather what I want to know by hearing the voice that they are using to compose their blogs.

What do you think that writers for the web can learn about cultivating a voice? How could we apply that knowledge to our web design goals?

While I can't think of further rhetorical implications at the present, I'm sure there are many. Actually, I just thought of one: can the power of a blogger's voice be misued for nefarious ends? We had a little brouhaha over on Ben's blog related to the Maytag blog - it ended amiacably enough I think, but it could have gotten ugly. What if a blogger misrepresented himself and drew people in to something rather nasty? Miller and Shepherd talked about the website of a woman who pretended to have a sick child with cancer. Imagine the nefarious goals of someone out to defraud. It's awful to think about, but people prey on the elderly, the sick, the weak. There are a hundred thousand websites promising you the answers through astrology, psychic connections, lottery numbers via email - the web is just another channel for that kind of misbehavior. There was an article in Vanity Fair last month -- yes, I read Vanity Fair! It's the People magazine of the Hamptons, you know! Pure trash, just in a very nice package with great photography, but I digress (that one's just for you, John) -- about a teenage boy in England who created numerous identities for himself and drew another teenage boy into a web where he actually convinced the guy to try to kill someone. The person he was to attack was the first boy (yes, it's a very tangled web, sure to be a movie of the week any day now), meaning it may be the first instance of the internet being used in a suicide. But think about it. Say I write a blog about my life and my problems, soliciting money, help, aid of any sort. And it was all a lie. The damage could be just as serious, all caused by the almighty power of the voice. Remember Aristotle gave an awful lot of leeway to the rhetor. Rhetoric is the tool of the powerful and can be used to subjugate the meek, or defend all kinds of things, from institutionalized racism to the horrors of the Holocaust, or recently, Darfur. I read a lot of blogs because of the power of the voice. But a powerful voice can convince people to maim, torture, and kill.

Having said that, the power of the voice can really be a powerful way to create real communication, even between companies and customers. Neil Gaiman's blog is one instance of a place where real, honest-to-God communication takes place between an artist and his flock, if you will, of admirers. I think Gaiman keeps it up because it keeps his intentions honest, to be in such close contact with the consumers of his work. He can't retreat into a shell and pretend he doesn't know what they are looking for from him, can he? But neither can his fans pretend to misunderstand when he begs (on those rare occasions) for privacy and peace. To know people in their real, everyday lives is to in some way take responsibility for them. If I grant you access to my life, I'm also entrusting you with it, in a sense. Will you use that power against me, for ill? Certainly many celebrities learn of the danger of revealing too much personal information. But some have managed to turn those into real connections that enrich their lives, as I would argue Gaiman has done. Think of a world in which we all really, truly understand each other because we have made these personal, one-to-one connections with one another. Can I really turn my back when others are in danger? Can I really set up a Star Wars network when I know all the people who are within my sights? Take John's Six Degrees of Separation tool on Live Journal. Connections between us really are that close . . . and getting closer all the time. That's the power of the networked world, and, I think, why people get jazzed up about the internet and new technologies like it. Because once you know, you can understand, and once you understand, you can't help but change. That's life. That's how you can change the world. For good, or bad.